Credit: ©The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.14869

    Comet

    Date
    17 November 1682
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Manuscript page number
    p241a
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (page): 59mm
    width (page): 158mm
    Subject
    Content object
    space
       > comet
    Description
    Separate drawing, inserted before p. 241.

    Figure of a comet observed by Johannes Hevelius in August 1682. His observation was read at the meeting on 22 November 1682, and printed in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 13, no. 143 (1683).
    Object history
    22 November 1682, ‘Mr. Aston read a letter to himself from Mr. Hevelius, dated at Dantzick 17 November 1682, N. S. desiring assistance of the Society for the printing of his globes, of which he had the design ready drawn, […] In the same letter was an account of the observations, which he had made of the late comet, with some other celestial observations, and the daily places and motions of the comet taken off from a globe, but not by calculation, and a small draught of the apparent figure of the comet on the [blank] of August. Whereupon Mr. Hooke fetched his observations on the same comet, and shewed the figure of it taken by himself on the same day, having carefully observed it with a fourteen feet telescope, and delineated it with his own hand’ (Birch 4:166-67).

    Printed as fig. 2 in J. Hevelius, ‘Observation of a comet which began to appear 16 August 1682 at Dantzick’, Phil. Trans. vol 13, no. 143 (January 1683), pp, 16-19 (ref. to fig. 2 on p. 19).
    Related fellows
    Johannes Hevelius (1611 - 1687, German/Polish) , Astronomer
    Francis Aston (1644 - 1715, British) , Natural philosopher
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > Europe
          > Poland
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