Long Term Comets Research Paper

History of Long-Term Comets

Have you ever wondered who and how things were discovered? Who named Mars, how the names for constellations for created, or how long-term or short-term comets were named and discovered? Long-Term comets are comets that have an orbital period greater than 200 years and are 50,000-70,000 AU (astronomical units) from the sun. In this paper, I will tell you briefly about how long-term comets are named and seen, and about two major long-term comets, Comet West and Comet Kohoutek.
Discovering a comet is not as easy as discovering a star. I say this, because you also have to have the orbital path calculated for a comet. This can take up to a year, because the proper orbit of a long-term cannot be calculated until it has gone out of the planetary regions of the solar system. While you may see a comet that has never been seen before, a lot more
West was examining photographic plates, taken by the Schmidt telescope, and discovered a comet in the constellation Microscopium. This comet became known as Comet West (C/1975 VI). The C stands for the 3rd comet discovered in the year 1975 and, of course, the 1975 because that was the year it was discovered. Once it was discovered, they started calculating its orbital path to see how close it would come to the sun. Comet West turned out to be much more spectacular than they thought when it passes closest to the sun. Comet West reached a magnificent brightness of -3, which made it brighter than Venus in the morning sky. Comet West is named one of the brightest stars in comet history. Comet West has an astounding estimated orbital period of 559,000 years. That means that Comet West will not be seen again until year 560,975, which sounds really strange. Comet West will be one-fourth of the way to the nearest star beyond the sun, Alpha Centauri, when it is at its furthest distance from our Sun. This calculates into 70,000 AU from our