In 1705 Edmond Halley printed the paths of 24 comets in one table. Three of them, seen in 1531, 1607 and 1682, had almost the same numbers. One comet, he said, and wrote: "Hence I dare venture to foretell, That it will return again in the Year 1758." He was 48; he would have had to live to 102.

The gaps between visits were not equal: 76 years, then just under 75. Halley blamed the pull of the planets, and died in 1742.

In 1757 three people in Paris took over. Alexis Clairaut had the method; Jérôme Lalande and Nicole-Reine Lepaute did the arithmetic for more than six months, adding up the pull of Jupiter and Saturn. In November 1758 Clairaut gave the result: the comet would be late, passing the Sun about the middle of April 1759, and he might be a month off.

On Christmas night 1758 Johann Georg Palitzsch, a farmer near Dresden who had taught himself astronomy, saw it first. It passed the Sun on 13 March 1759: a month early, as far off as Clairaut had said he might be.

On screen, pink is the guess and blue is what was seen. The orbit sketch is not to scale.

It is due again on 28 July 2061. Where will you be?

Sources: Edmond Halley, A Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets, 1705; Halley, Astronomical Tables, 1752; Charles Messier's memoir in Philosophical Transactions 55, 1765; Jérôme Lalande, Bibliographie astronomique, 1803; Peter Broughton, "The first predicted return of comet Halley", Journal for the History of Astronomy 16, 1985; NASA/JPL Horizons.
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