Abstract
THE COMET OF 1532.—This comet, the second of the uve observed by Apian, as described in his rare work, the “Astronomicum Cæsarium,” has been the subject of much computation and discussion in connection with its long-assumed identity with the comet of 1661 observed by Hevelius, to which attention was directed by Halley when he published his “Synopsis of Cometary Astronomy.” We read: “Halley was apt to believe that the comet of 1532 was the same with that observed by Hevelius in the beginning of 1661, but Apian's observations, which are the only ones we have, are too inaccurate to determine anything certain from them in so nice an affair.” Pingré fully believed in the identity of the comets of 1532 and 1661, and in his “Cometographie” has endeavoured to point out several previous appearances of the same body, as in the year 1402, when he expresses his conviction that the great comet recorded in so many of the European chronicles about Easter was no other than the one in question. Between the perihelion passages of 1532 and 1661 is a period of 128¼ years, and so the return of the comet was long expected about 1789. Shortly before this year, however, the rediscussion of the observations of 1532 and 1661 was made the subject of a prize by the Paris Academy of Sciences, which was gained by Mechain.
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Our Astronomical Column . Nature 20, 319 (1879). https://doi.org/10.1038/020319a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/020319a0