Abstract
TEMPEL'S COMET, 1867 11.—M. Raoul Gautier has published in the Memoirs of the Société de Physique et d'Histoire Naturelle de Genève, vol. xxix. No. 12, a discussion of the orbit of the comet discovered by Herr W. Tempel, at Marseilles, on April 3, 1867, with especial reference to its appearances in 1873 and 1879. There are several points of especial interest about this comet: not only was it an addition to the number of known comets of short period, but it possesses the peculiarity of an elliptic orbit of but slight inclination, and of Jess eccentricity than that of any other member of the same class. Its spectrum, too, would seem to be unusual, for the imperfect view of it obtained by Dr. Huggins, May 4 and 8, 1867, led him to conclude that the bright bands, which it gave together with a continuous spectrum, were not those of carbon. Its orbit, and especially its period, is also subject to great perturbations from the action of Jupiter, and its perihelion distance was considerably increased between 1873 and 1867 without its aphelion distance being much altered. It had also been identified by M. Winnecke with the comet observed by Goldschmidt at Paris, May 16, 1855, in a search for De Vico's comet, but von Asten's inquiries have shown that the identification was an erroneous one.
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Our Astronomical Column . Nature 37, 445–446 (1888). https://doi.org/10.1038/037445a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/037445a0