It’s November 14, 1680. Frost gathers on the stone roofs of Coburg, Germany. The stars above, as so often on autumn nights, have lost their summer blur. They’ve turned sharper and sprinkle the sky with specks of ice-blue and candlelight yellow.
Gottfried Kirch is up early. He makes his living calculating moon phases and star tables for local calendars. During this early morning hour, he’s observing a half-moon passing alongside the amber spark of Mars.
He sweeps his homemade optical tube through the constellation Leo, past the fiery star of Regulus. And then, nearby, he lands on a patch of low light. It is a pale, fourth-magnitude smudge. He checks his charts; nothing is recorded there. He jots down a note: “I found a rare, dim star, which appeared nebulous. I had never seen such a star in that place before, and my charts showed nothing.” This moment will go down in history as the first comet ever discovered using a telescope.
The Buccaneer’s Sky
It is the salt-sprayed morning of November 29, 1680.1 A man named Basil Ringrose stands near the wooden railing of a privateer vessel commanded by the notorious buccaneer Captain Bartholomew Sharp. They are piloting the waters near Chile and preparing for a midnight raid on the Spanish port city of Coquimbo.
Ringrose lives the rough life of a pirate, but he is also a journal keeper and geographer. An hour before dawn, he glances up and notices a dull light with a tail near the constellation Libra. He logs it in his notes right alongside the plans for that morning’s assault: “This morning, about an hour before the day we observed a comet to appear… The body thereof seemed dull, and its tail extended itself 18 or 20 degrees in length, being of a pale color.”
Quarrel Across the Ocean
Meanwhile, a Spanish Jesuit missionary named Eusebio Kino charts the comet’s course from the docks of Cádiz, Spain, during a delayed departure for the New World. To Kino, a comet is a supernatural portent of disaster. When he finally arrives in Mexico City, he publishes his Exposición astronómica de el cometa (1681) to present his findings.
In Mexico City, a mathematician named Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora observes the same comet from the roof of the Royal University and comes to the opposite conclusion. Sigüenza is tired of watching his countrymen panic at the sky. A comet, he argues, is simply matter in motion, nothing more. He publishes a treatise making that case in early 1681. It’s one small step in prying astronomy loose from astrology.
Kino reads it and doesn’t care for it. He fires back a rebuttal without naming Sigüenza directly.
Sigüenza doesn’t answer right away. The comet fades. It isn’t until 1690, nine years on, that he finally publishes his full reply: Libra Astronómica y Filosófica, a book twice the length of Kino’s, taking his argument apart point by point. All of it over a smudge of light neither of them had fully understood in 1680.
The Vanishing Act
By early December, the comet has swung so close to the sun’s position in the sky that it vanishes from the night. It isn’t gone. It’s just lost, swallowed by the glare of morning and evening twilight. Most observers assume the traveler has burned up.
They’re wrong. The comet hasn’t died
On December 18, 1680, the comet reaches perihelion—its closest point to the sun. It’s skimming just 234,800 kilometers (145,900 miles) above the surface! The comet brightens to an astonishing magnitude of -6, so incandescent that for two days, the 18th and 19th, it does something almost no comet manages: it becomes visible in broad daylight, right next to the sun itself. Citizens looking up at midday are treated to the sight of a headless sword hanging in a blue sky.
By late December, the comet swings back out and reemerges at dusk. For anyone standing out in those final, frost-locked weeks of 1680, the comet’s icy nucleus sinks beneath the western horizon almost immediately after the sun.
But the tail stays behind. This headless highway of light remains pinned to the heavens for several hours, fanning out from the western horizon to almost overhead!
To the citizens gathering together on the frozen canals of Rotterdam, it looks like a blade of light with nothing left to hold it up. The Dutch artist Lieve Verschuier captures this moment on the evening of December 26 in a contemporary painting.
On one side of his canvas, terrified citizens and weeping children turn away. But right next to them, standing shoulder to shoulder in the snow, are men holding up wooden “Jacob’s staffs” to measure the tail’s angle and length. It’s the transition of an era, caught in paint, as the scientific revolution collides with ancient terror.
This cultural panic ran deep. Across the German states, mints begin striking silver and copper Kometenmedaillen—comet medals—meant to serve as both a historical record and a talisman against the public’s fear.
On the front, the coins capture the long-tailed wanderer slicing through a field of stars. On the reverse, an inscription blends the meteorological record with prayer: “The star threatens evil things: Only trust! God will make things turn to good.”
People slip these tokens into their pockets as reassurance that even if the sky seems to be unraveling, the universe remains held together by a higher order.
Not everyone was so easily settled.
One Comet or Two?
The comet’s trajectory creates a massive scientific puzzle.
Because it vanished in the morning sky and reappeared days later in the evening sky, heading in a seemingly different direction, prominent astronomers like Giovanni Domenico Cassini argue that they are looking at two entirely different comets.
It takes two stubborn Englishmen to clear that up.
The Astronomer Who Wouldn’t Yield
John Flamsteed, England’s first Astronomer Royal, works from the Greenwich Observatory despite chronic health problems that make the damp, frosty nights genuinely painful for him.
Flamsteed tracks the inbound morning comet through November, and when it vanishes into the sun’s glare in early December, he doesn’t close his notebook. He keeps watching, waiting for it to return.
When the evening comet blazes out a week later, Flamsteed runs the numbers on both sightings and concludes that it’s not two objects performing a relay, but one comet tracing a tight turn around the sun.
Excited by the discovery, Flamsteed pens a letter to Isaac Newton. It is the same comet, Flamsteed argues, and he offers up his observational coordinates as proof.
Newton’s Doubt
Newton isn’t convinced. In the winter of 1680, he’s a man possessed by the hidden mechanics of the world, yet his grand theory of universal gravitation is still unpolished.
When he receives Flamsteed’s letter, the idea of a body plunging straight at the sun, surviving the heat, and whipping around in a hairpin turn doesn’t fit anything he understands about how comets move. He writes back suggesting Flamsteed is seeing a phenomenon of timing—two different comets that happen to cross paths, invisibly, behind the sun.
At the time, conventional wisdom dictates that comets move through space only in straight lines. The idea that a physical body could dive straight at the sun and execute a U-turn seems completely impossible.
It sets off an intellectual tug-of-war across the English countryside. Flamsteed keeps sending his data from Greenwich. Newton keeps working the numbers by candlelight in Cambridge, trying to make them fit the straight-line model he still believes in.
But the data never cooperates.
The Turning Point
Then, in 1682, a new comet blazes across the sky. Edmond Halley watches it closely, and what he sees convinces him that comets don’t travel in straight lines at all. He carries that conviction back to Newton and pushes him to reconsider.
Halley’s own data, stacked against Flamsteed’s numbers, finally tip the balance. Newton comes around to what Flamsteed said from the start: it’s one comet, not two. The morning ghost and the evening blaze are the same object, and it has followed a parabolic path.
In that stroke of the pen, the heavens and the Earth became one house. The force that drops an apple in an English orchard is the same hand guiding that dirty snowball around the sun and back into the dark.
Echoes in the Heavens
By early February 1681, the grand show was over. The comet faded from naked-eye view. A few astronomers continued to chase its dim light through their glass lenses. In a final stroke of historical irony, the last telescopic observation of the comet, recorded on March 19, 1681, was made by none other than Isaac Newton himself. The skeptic had become the final witness.
Flamsteed spent the rest of his life compiling a star catalog so precise it outlived him by centuries. His comet data made it into Newton’s Principia, the very proof that settled the argument, and Newton never once credited him for it. That slight would resurface decades later, when Newton tried to seize Flamsteed’s unfinished star catalog and publish it without his consent, a fight bitter enough to outlast them both.
Gottfried Kirch died in Berlin in 1710, still a calendar-maker by trade, having lived long enough to see his “rare, dim star” change how people understood the universe.
A Postscript History Books Leave Out
Bent over their candles late at night, Newton and Edmond Halley worked out that the comet should return in roughly 575 years, around 2255. They even wondered if, on that next pass, it might swing close enough to fall straight into the sun.
It was one of the few times these two men allowed themselves a moment of uneasy speculation. And they were completely wrong. The comet’s true orbit is closer to ten thousand years, a journey their mathematics, however brilliant, wasn’t yet built to measure.
Out past the reach of anyone’s telescope, that comet is still out there, tracing its slow arc through the dark. It won’t return in our lifetime, or in the lifetimes of many generations yet unborn. But somewhere around the year 11,680, it will swing back toward the sun, indifferent to whoever happens to be watching.
- All dates in this article are given in the Gregorian calendar (New Style) for consistency with modern usage. In 1680, many English, Dutch, and maritime observers (including Basil Ringrose aboard Sharpe’s ship) still used the Julian calendar (Old Style), which was 10 days behind the Gregorian calendar. Thus, Ringrose’s observation recorded as November 19 Julian corresponds to November 29 Gregorian. ↩︎
Sources and Further Reading
Cohen, I. B. (Ed.). (1999). The Correspondence of Isaac Newton (Vol. 2). Cambridge University Press.
Forbes, E. G., & Forbes, M. (Eds.). (1995). The correspondence of John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal (Vols. 1–3). Institute of Physics Publishing.
Great Comet of 1680. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved July 10, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Comet_of_1680
Hale, B. (2020, December 12). Comet of the week: The Great Comet of 1680. RocketSTEM. https://www.rocketstem.org/2020/12/12/ice-and-stone-comet-of-week-51/
Halley, E. (n.d.). In World History Encyclopedia. Retrieved July 10, 2026, from https://www.worldhistory.org/Edmond_Halley/
Hughes, D. W. (1988). The Principia and comets. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 42(1), 53–74.
Inglis-Arkell, E. (2015, March 10). Here’s what happens when you screw with Isaac Newton. Gizmodo. https://gizmodo.com/heres-what-happens-when-you-screw-with-isaac-newton-1690479177
John Flamsteed, Isaac Newton, and the Comet of 1680. (2022, August 18). Obscure Histories. https://www.obscurehistories.com/post/john-flamsteed-isaac-newton-and-the-comet-of-1680
Newton, I. (1687). Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. Joseph Streater.
Ringrose, B. (1685). The dangerous voyage and bold attempts of Captain Bartholomew Sharp and others. In Bucaniers of America (Vol. 2). William Crooke.
Seargent, D. A. J. (2008). The greatest comets in history: Broom stars and celestial scimitars. Springer Science & Business Media.
The astronomy wars in England. (n.d.). EBSCO Research Starters. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/astronomy-and-astrophysics/astronomy-wars-england