Word: comets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Considerable controversy has taken place during the vacation regarding the failure of Comet Cunningham to show up more clearly. Professor William H. Barton of New York's Hayden Planetarium has ridiculed it as "a washout and a rank failure...
Leland E. Cunningham, the Observatory astronomer who discovered the comet, has countered with the statement that if has lived up to expectations as far as astronomers are concerned...
Loring Andrews, former teacher of astronomy here, tried to pour oil on troubled waters with an article in the M.I.T. Review. He suggested that the comet had been coming this way for 2000 years, and was too tired to glow. Its last appearance here, he said, "was probably about the time Archimedes was crying 'Eureka...
Discovered on photographic plates last September by Leland Cunningham of Harvard Observatory, the comet last week was about 100,000,000 miles from earth, about the same distance from the sun. On Jan. 10 it comes closest to earth (54,000,000 miles), on Jan. 16 closest to the sun (33,000,000 miles). By then, on account of the sun's dazzling proximity, the show will be over...
Astronomers cannot say in advance just how bright a comet will be, because they do not know how much tail it will acquire when it approaches the sun-for the tail of a comet consists of very thin material driven away from the head by pressure of solar radiation. So far, according to Harvard, the Cunningham's tail is developing "very, very nicely." It was more than 1,600,000 miles long last week and still growing. It is possible that the earth will pass through the tail. If so, no harm will be done. The earth probably swept...