Halley did not live to see his prediction fulfilled (he died in 1742), but he wrote shortly before he died: “If this Comet should return according to our predictions about the year 1758, impartial posterity will not refuse to acknowledge that this was first discovered by an Englishman.”
All through the year 1758 the most noted astronomers of Europe were on the lookout for the return of the predicted Comet. One of these astronomers, Messier, looked for it through his telescope at the Paris Observatory every night from sunset to sunrise throughout that whole year. On Christmas night, 1758, the Comet was first seen by a German peasant near Dresden, who had heard about the Comet and was looking for it. He was a man of unusually good eyesight, yet his discovery was doubted until Messier, nearly a month afterward, at Paris, “picked up” the Comet with his telescope.
From that time forth this Comet, which returned in 1835, and is reappearing in this year (1910), has been known as Halley’s Comet.
EDMUND HALLEY.
Besides this achievement, Halley accomplished many other noteworthy feats in astronomy, such as his discovery of the proper motions of the fixed stars; his detection of the “long inequality” of Jupiter and Saturn, and of the acceleration of the moon’s mean motion; his theory of variation, including the hypothesis of various magnetic poles, with his suggestion of the magnetic origin of the aurora borealis; and his indication of a method still used for determining the solar parallax by means of the transits of Venus.
On the strength of these achievements, Halley for many years was elected to serve as secretary to the Royal Society. Commissioned as a Captain in the Royal Navy, he also commanded a vessel on a long cruise of exploration, and late in life he was made Astronomer Royal.
Although in his sixty-fourth year, he then undertook to observe the moon through an entire revolution of her nodes (eighteen years), and actually carried out his purpose. To appreciate the full significance of so painstaking an achievement it should be borne in mind that astronomical observations must be made in a temperature equal to that of the open air. Observatories cannot be heated because the heat would impair the accuracy of the instruments.
Great astronomers, like poets, are born, not made. Edmund Halley was one of these. At the age of seventeen he had already observed the change in the variations of the compass. At nineteen he was recognized as an astronomer of reputation, having supplied a new and improved method of determining the elements of the planetary orbits. His detection of considerable errors in the tables then in use led him to the conclusion that a more accurate determination of the places of the fixed Stars was indispensable to the progress of astronomy. With this end in view he set out on a voyage to the other side of the globe, St. Helena, where he undertook the task of making complete new observations of the entire Southern Hemisphere. Though the Heavens proved clouded he succeeded within two years in registering three hundred and sixty stars, a colossal achievement which won for him the title of the “Southern Tycho.” This was when Halley was barely of age.
(The famous astronomer Tycho Brahe, long before this had won his fame by mapping the stars of the Northern Heavens.)