On this day in 1909, German astronomer Max Wolf rediscovered Halley’s Comet on its flyby past the earth. Wolf was a wunderkind: Born in 1863, he discovered his first comet at 21 years old, observed a nova in our neighboring galaxy Andromeda a year later, and went on to discover hundreds of planets.
A seasoned scientist and space photographer by 1909, Wolf and his colleague were the winners of a feverish race to be the first to see Halley’s Comet on its return.
The comet had been a sensation in the scientific community since Edmond Halley’s 1705 discovery that three historical comet sightings were actually one in the same orbiting past Earth roughly every 76 years.
Halley never saw the comet’s return, passing away in 1742. But true to his word, the comet was spotted again in 1758, and again in 1835 before Wolf observed it. It most recently returned in 1986. Read more here and here.
