Two hundred and twenty-eight years ago, when this Comet was seen
shining over the City of London, the great astronomer, Edmund Halley,
made a special study of it.
Halley was the first to say that this Comet had come before and would
surely come again. He wrote down the time when the Comet would come
again, long after he should be dead.
“If it should return,” he wrote, “according to our predictions, about
the year 1758, impartial posterity will not refuse to acknowledge that
this was first discovered by an Englishman.”
The Comet returned, as he had foretold, seventeen years after Halley’s
death, when it was first seen in 1758, on Christmas night, by a man in
Saxony, named Palitsch, who was looking for the Comet.
From that day this Comet has been called after Halley.
Since then many famous astronomers, such as Clairaut, Pontécoulant and
Laplace in France, have calculated the dates for the Comet’s return.
Last time, in 1835, Halley’s Comet returned within a few nights of
their prediction.
This time, so the astronomers figured seventy-five years ago, the Comet
should be plainly seen after dark late this May.
What they predicted has come true.