C/1874 H1 (Coggia)
great Comet
C/1874 H1 (Coggia) is a non-periodic comet, which in the summer of 1874 could be seen by the naked eye. On the basis of its brightness, the comet has been called the Great Comet of 1874; on July 13 of that year its apparent magnitude peaked at between 0 and 1.
Discovery and observations
The astronomer Jérôme Eugène Coggia discovered this comet on 17 April 1874 at the Marseille Observatory. During the remainder of April and in May the comet was closely observed by many astronomers, including Winnecke in Straßburg, Tempel in Arcetri, Rayet in Paris, Schulhof in Vienna, Rümker in Hamburg, Schmidt in Athens, Bruhns in Leipzig, Christie in Greenwich and Dreyer in Copenhagen. In mid-May telescopes revealed the development of a faint tail.
In early June the comet became visible to the naked eye and by the end of June its brightness reached magnitude 4. By the beginning of July the tail had grown to 6° and by the 16th of July to 45°. The tail was straight and narrow, stretching across from 1° to 2° of the sky at the tail's end.
According to David A. J. Seargent,
"Without doubt, C/1874 H1 (Coggia) was a beauty; a true great comet. At its brightest, it probably exceeded the first magnitude and displayed a series of envelopes within its coma that astronomers compared with Donati's Comet 16 years earlier.
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This entry incorporates text from “C/1874 H1 (Coggia)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.