Great Comet of 1680
comet
C/1680 V1, also called the Great Comet of 1680, Kirch's Comet, and Newton's Comet, was the first comet discovered by telescope. It was discovered by Gottfried Kirch and was one of the brightest comets of the seventeenth century. It passed about 235000 km from the surface of the Sun.
Overview
The comet was discovered by Gottfried Kirch, a German astronomer, on 14 November 1680 (New Style), in Coburg, and it became one of the brightest comets of the seventeenth century – reputedly visible even in daytime – and was noted for its spectacularly long tail. Passing 0.42 au from Earth on 30 November 1680, it sped around an extremely close perihelion of 0.00622 AU (930,000 km; 578,000 mi); or just 1.34 solar radii, 0.34 radii above the Sun's surface) on 18 December 1680, reaching its peak brightness on 29 December as it swung outward. It was last observed on 19 March 1681. JPL Horizons shows the comet has roughly a barycentric orbital period of 10,400 years. As of 2026 the comet is about 260 au (39 billion km) from the Sun.
While the Kirch Comet of 1680–1681 was discovered by – and subsequently named for – Gottfried Kirch, credit must also be given to Eusebio Kino, the Spanish Jesuit priest who charted the comet's course. During his delayed departure for Mexico, Kino began his observations of the comet in Cádiz in late 1680.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1548770. The Library of Congress control number is sh2017004620. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1680, 1681 and 2026.
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This entry incorporates text from “Great Comet of 1680” 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.