Abstract
THE COMET OF 1577.—For more reasons than one the comet which was observed at the end of 1577 and beginning of 1578 deserves prominent mention in the history of these bodies. It must have been the brightest comet of the sixteenth century, visible even in full sunshine, as we know from the testimony of Tycho Brahe, and it was from his careful observations of it, made at a critical time in the discussion as to the nature and distance of comets, that he proved it to have a much smaller parallax than the moon, and hence to be situated far beyond our satellite. Tycho's observations formed part of a work which, though it appears to have been completed so far as it referred to the comet in 1588, and copies distributed by Tycho to his friends in that year, was not published in the full sense of the term until 1603, when it was brought out at Prague after his death, under the care of his son-in-law. The work is entitled “Tychonis Brahe, Dani, De mundi ætheri recentioribus phænonienis liber secundus, qui est de illustri stella caudatâ anno 1577 conspectâ”. In 1648 it was reprinted at Frankfort in the collective edition of Tycho's works. Pingré refers to the inaccuracy with which the observations of the comet were given in this edition, which served him for his Cometographie, but he thought he had discovered and corrected all the errors in his transcript of the observations for that work (vol. i. pp. 513-16).
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Our Astronomical Column . Nature 21, 383–384 (1880). https://doi.org/10.1038/021383a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/021383a0