Astronomy

Cheseaux’s Comet of 1744

Okay, so maybe you’re not that crazy about comets, but I promise you’ll like No. 5 in our Comet of the Week: the famous Cheseaux’s Comet of 1744, or, as I like to call it, The Great Singing Comet.

Cheseaux's Comet

What distinguishes this comet, spotted in late 1743 by, among others, the Swiss astronomer Jean-Philippe de Cheseaux, was its remarkable six-rayed tail.

“The comet arrived at perihelion on March 1 by which time it was bright enough to be observed in daylight with the naked eye. After perihelion a spectacular multiple tail developed which rose well above the morning horizon, in a dark sky while the head was still well below that same horizon. The tail formed a giant fan comprised of six multiple tails. While astronomers were familiar with comets having two tails (a straight gas or ion tail and a curved dust trail), one with six was something completely different.” (From Hunting and Imaging Comets, by Martin Mobberley, 2011.)

But wait! It gets better: Cheseaux’s comet made noise. Yes. Chinese astronomers, who also observed it, reported hearing sounds issuing from the comet. I like to imagine it as a kind of singing:

“Mysteriously, some of the Chinese records of this comet describe atmospheric sounds when the object was at its peak. In an era when there were no planes or cars how can this be explained? Maybe the sounds were distant animals howling in terror at the sight of such an awesome spectacle?” (Mobberly.)

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology offers this possible explanation for sounds emanating from falling stars and comets:

“This was one of closest cometary approaches on record. If the comet’s charged particles or magnetic field interacted with the magnetosphere, VLF waves may have been generated to produce electrophonic sounds at ground level.”

There you have it.

After the nights of March 7-8, Cheseaux’s Comet was never seen, or heard from, again. But it achieved such great and flashing fame that for a time it appeared on German coins.

The Great Comet of 1528

No. 4 in our Comet of the Week: The Great Comet of 1528. The best thing about this comet is its description, provided by Monsieur Ambroise Pare, “the father of modern surgery”:

“This comet was so horrible, so frightful, and it produced such great terror in the vulgar, that some died of fear, and others fell sick. It appeared to be of excessive length, and was of the colour of blood. At the summit of it was seen the figure of a bent arm, holding in its hand a great sword, as if about to strike. At the end of the point there were three stars. On both sides of the rays of this comet were seen a great number of axes, knives, blood-coloured swords, among which were a great number of hideous human faces, with beards and bristling hair.”

He even draws it for us:

Great Comet of 1528
(from Pare’s “Livres de Chirurgie,” in a chapter titled “Des Monstres Celestes.” Paris, 1597.)

One problem with this comet is that no one else saw it. There’s no other record of the Great Comet of 1528.

Even though he was no astronomer, Pare ought to be a reliable witness. He was court surgeon to Kings Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III. He’s famous for his many innovations in medicine and surgery, not the least of which were the prosthetics he invented for war amputees. Pare devised the first mechanical artificial hand, operated by catches and springs that simulated the joints of a real hand. It looked like this:

L0043496 Ambroise Pare: prosthetics, mechanical hand

But still: ” . . . a great number of axes, knives, blood-coloured swords, among which were a great number of hideous human faces, with beards and bristling hair . . .”

Really, Pare? Really?

Cat’s Eye Nebula

The Cat’s Eye Nebula, as photographed by the Hubble Telescope. Discovered in 1786, the Cat’s Eye Nebula lies 3,000 light years from Earth. Interestingly (for me anyway), the Cat’s Eye Nebula is only about 1000 years old (+/- 260 years).

Cat's Eye Nebula

A planetary nebula like this (which, confusingly, has nothing to do with planets) is a star near its last stage of life. A star begins as a cloud of molecular dust, settles into a main-sequence star like the Sun, expands to become a red giant, then contracts to a white dwarf, then dissipates as a planetary nebula, then explodes into a supernova. Somewhere in that sequence there are also red dwarfs and blue dwarfs.

You can see more amazing photos of deep space objects and such at NASA’s http://hubblesite.org/.

And here’s a trippy, catchy song about supernovas, by the band Oasis when they were still good:

Comet ISON Update

Here’s an artist’s rendition of how Comet ISON, the “Comet of the Century,” might look in December this year, from earthsky.org:

ISON18thDec5pm

And here’s a recent piece in Space.com that recalls another famous Comet of the Century:

“Remember Kohoutek?

“If you’re of a certain age, this story might have a familiar ring. Indeed, exactly 40 years ago, a comet by the name of Kohoutek was also discovered at a tremendously large distance from the sun, en route to a close solar encounter in late December 1973.

“Like ISON, Kohoutek was expected to dazzle — perhaps more than 100 times brighter than Venus. It, too, was dubbed “the comet of the century,” but in the end, Kohoutek turned out to be much dimmer and put on a rather disappointing show.”

Comets and Aerolites

“Comets and Aerolites,” from Reynolds’s Series of Astronomical Diagrams, by James Reynolds, 1847. An aerolite is a meteorite, specifically, a stony meteorite consisting of silicate materials.

The falling stars you see in a meteor shower are from the “dust trail” left by comets as they circle through the solar system.

Comets and Aerolites

Image from Stephen Ellcock’s FB page “The Celestial Archives: Pre-Space Age Images of the Heavens.”