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Comet Tempel-Tuttle keeps getting lost

When a comet takes 33 years to go around the Sun (compared to one year for Earth) it goes way out there and tends to get lost. Comet Tempel-Tuttle, responsible for the Leonids, gets lost a lot. It also gets found now and then.

Tempel-Tuttle was "discovered" by William Tempel in late 1865 and independently by Horace Tuttle in early 1866. Astronomers then figured out it had been observed in 1366 and 1699, too. An orbit was calculated, and they determined that the comet was connected to the annual Leonid meteor shower.

Nobody saw Tempel-Tuttle again until 1965, however. Then on March 4, 1997, armed with great orbital data, Karen Meech, Olivier Hainaut and James Bauer at the University of Hawaii "recovered" the comet yet again. Tempel-Tuttle will next return to the inner solar system in the year 2031.

[Leonids Full Coverage]

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