Great Comet of 1760
comet
The Great Comet of 1760, also known as C/1760 A1 by its modern nomenclature, was first seen on 7 January 1760 by Abbe Chevalier at Lisbon. Charles Messier also spotted the comet on 8 January 1760 in Paris, by the sword of Orion. The comet was his third discovery and the comet was the 51st to have a calculated orbit. Messier observed the comet for a total of 6 days.
Observational history
It approached the Earth to within approximately 0.0682 AU (10.20 million km; 6.34 million mi) on January 8, 1760. This was the 17th closest known approach by a comet up to 2006. Messier gave the comet a magnitude rating of 2.0, making it easily visible to the unaided eye. Messier also gave the comet an elongation angle of 140 degrees. Two days later, James Short also recorded his sighting of the comet while it was in the constellation Eridanus, noting that it moves about 2 degrees per day towards the west.
Messier came up against opposition from Navy astronomer Joseph Nicholas Delisle, who had employed Messier from October 1751, because Delisle would not publish the discovery Messier had made.
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This entry incorporates text from “Great Comet of 1760” 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.