Later the same night, an American doctor and amateur astronomer, Henry Draper, took spectra of the same comet.
Edmond Halley was the first to realize that periodic sightings were actually returns of the same comet.
In any case, it was Edmund Halley who first concluded in 1705 that three comet sitings from 1531, 1607 and 1682 were most likely observations of the same comet.
Actually, it was not Messier, but Edmund Halley (who discovered the famous comet of the same name), who first mentioned it in 1715, having discovered it the previous year: "This is but a little Patch," he wrote, "but it shows itself to the naked Eye, when the Sky is serene and the Moon absent".
By astronomical observation and by viewing telescope images through a stereoscopic microscope, Shoemaker and his wife, Carolyn, and an amateur astronomer named David Levy discovered the comet later known as Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.
The program, which discovered the Siding Spring comet that narrowly missed Mars on Sunday, was shut down last year after losing funding.
You've got eau de Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Scientists at the University of Bern in Switzerland recently discovered the comet's pungent scent by analyzing a mixture of molecules detected in the comet's coma, the cloud of particles and gases around the space rock's nucleus.
It was two amateurs, for example, who discovered the Hale-Bopp comet in 1995.
For someone with no ambition to discover the next comet, this was more my speed.
With her husband, Gene Shoemaker, and David H. Levy, she discovered the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet in 1993.
