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69P/Taylor

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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.

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 sections
Contents
  • 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.