69P/Taylor
Sign in to saveComet Taylor, also known as 69P/Taylor, is a Jupiter-family comet with a 7.64-year orbit around the Sun. It is the only comet discovered by South African astronomer, Clement Jennings Taylor.
Key facts
- Comet.name
- 69P/Taylor
- Comet.discoverer
- Clement J. Taylor
- Comet.discovery_site
- Cape Town, South Africa
- Comet.discovery_date
- 24 November 1915
- Comet.mpc_name
- D/1915 W1P/1976 X1
- Comet.epoch
- 21 November 2025 (JD 2461000.5)
- Comet.observation_arc
- 103.28 years
- Comet.obs
- 854
- Comet.perihelion
- 2.271 AU
- Comet.aphelion
- 5.489 AU
- Comet.semimajor
- 3.879 AU
- Comet.period
- 7.641 years
- Comet.eccentricity
- 0.41469
- Comet.inclination
- 22.061°
- Comet.asc_node
- 104.81°
- Comet.arg_peri
- 343.53°
- Comet.mean
- 314.03°
- Comet.tjup
- 2.797
via Wikipedia infobox
~3 min read
Encyclopedic overview
7 sectionsContents
- Observational history
- Discovery
- Loss and recovery
- Follow-up observations
- Physical characteristics
- References
- External links
Comet Taylor, also known as 69P/Taylor, is a Jupiter-family comet with a 7.64-year orbit around the Sun. It is the only comet discovered by South African astronomer, Clement Jennings Taylor.
== Observational history == === Discovery === The comet was first discovered by Clement J. Taylor from Cape Town, South Africa on 24 November 1915. It was first recognized as a periodic comet after Hamilton Jeffers and Ferdinand J. Neubauer calculated its orbit on February 1916. Around the same time, George van Biesbroeck and Edward Emerson Barnard observed the comet from the Yerkes Observatory, and reported that the comet split into two distinct nuclei, A and B. Barnard initially identified the brighter Fragment A as the main component of Comet Taylor, however he later determined that it was Fragment B the actual main body instead, after orbital calculations of the latter fragment matched that of the pre-breakup nucleus, indicating that Fragment A was undergoing an outburst at the time. The comet was last seen on May 1917.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “69P/Taylor” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.