178P/Hug–Bell
comet
178P/Hug–Bell is a Jupiter-family comet with a 6.9-year orbit around the Sun. It was discovered by Northeast Kansas Amateur Astronomers' League members Gary Hug and Graham Bell and is thought to be the first periodic comet to be discovered by amateurs. It was declared a comet less than two days after its initial discovery, after having its course confirmed on previous images.
Orbit
Hug–Bell's orbital period is about seven years; its orbit is eccentric, though less so than many comets. Hug–Bell's orbit lies entirely outside the orbit of Mars, but at its aphelion overlaps in solar distance with the orbit of Jupiter. Because it never comes closer to the Sun than about 2 AU (300 million km), it is never expected to be a very bright comet, with a typical perihelion magnitude of 18–19.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “178P/Hug–Bell” as comet. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 2, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4553351. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “178P/Hug–Bell” 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.