comet: 1873
Daily Gleaner, May 30, 1873
A Comet is now visible in the south-eastern sky from about 8 to 10 o'clock and has been seen regularly for three or four nights past.
I don't know which comet was seen in Kingston in late May 1873. The sighting falls about half way between the two comets noted in the list below from the New York Times later that year, so could it have been a different comet altogether?
If the comet seen in Kingston in 1873 really was what is now well known as 9P/Tempel 1 (here referred to as Comet II 1867, and Comet I 1873) then we are dealing with a very interesting celestial object.
Early sightings:
Comet 9P/Tempel 1 was discovered on April 3, 1867 by Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel of Marseilles France while visually searching for comets. The comet was then 9th magnitude and described by Tempel as having an apparent diameter of 4 to 5 arcmin across. Later calculations revealed that the comet had been situated 0.71 AU from the Earth and 1.64 AU from the sun at that time.
The comet was very well placed for its 1867 discovery thanks to its closest approach to Earth (0.568 AU) and its perihelion (1.562 AU), which occurred on May 15 and May 24, respectively. Over the next five months after its initial detection, subsequent observations were frequently made. The comet was last detected on August 27, 1867 by Julius Schmidt, at which point the comet had become too faint for position measurements. At that time the comet was 1.30 AU from Earth and 1.81 AU from the sun.
The comet was first recognized as periodic in May of 1867 when C. Bruhns of Leipzig determined the orbital period to be 5.74 years. By the time the final observations had been made of the 1867 apparition, the orbital period had been re-calculated to be 5.68 years.
The comet was recovered on April 4, 1873 by E.J.M. Stephan of Marseilles, France. The comet remained under observation until July 1st of that year.
Predictions were made for an 1879 return, with the most ambitious being that of Raoul Gautier who computed definitive orbits from the two previous appearances before making his predictions for the upcoming return. Gautier's predictions enabled Tempel to recover the comet on April 25, 1879. The comet was observed until its last detection on July 8.
In 1881, comet Tempel 1 passed 0.55 AU from Jupiter. Due to gravitational interactions, the comet's orbital period was increased to 6.5 years and the perihelion distance was increased from 1.8 AU to 2.1 AU, making the comet an even fainter object. Subsequently, the comet was lost and it was not observed at its next expected return. Photographic attempts during 1898 and 1905 failed to recover the comet.
9P/Tempel 1 was finally rediscovered in 1972 and after that was again observed on schedule at every succeeding apparition.
In 1999, NASA, in collaboration with various academic institutions, embarked on a project to find out more about the nature of comets, and 9P/Tempel 1 was made the object of this Deep Impact mission
The NASA projectile made contact with 9P/Tempel 1 in July 2005 providing much new information on the nature of comets. The view of the comet at impact perhaps brings into close focus the "light in the sky" that Kingstonians saw dimly at a distance in the summer of 1873.
lights in the sky
