Word: orbits
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Lopsided Planet. Eros is one of hundreds of asteroids (small planets) spinning around the sun as devotedly as if they were big planets. Mostly their orbits lie between Mars and Jupiter. The egg-shaped orbit of Eros, however, swings it far inside the Martian track and it is possible for it to approach within 14,000.000 miles of Earth. After its discovery in 1898. asteroid watchers noticed that sometimes Eros varied in brightness over a period of 5¼ hr. If this was the period of its rotation, the variation might have been due to one side being much darker...
Last week, after calculations of its orbit, Harvard announced that the comet was approaching Earth, had already increased in brightness from the ninth magnitude to the eighth. Now 120,000,000 miles distant, it will come within 20,000,000 miles (less than one-quarter of the distance to the Sun) before receding. At its nearest approach late in July, it will have reached the sixth magnitude, will be the first naked-eye comet since...
...Prentice who discovered Nova Herculis, the spectacular "new star" of 1934 (TIME, Dec. 31, 1934). A British music-hall comedian named Will Hay was among the first to see the great white spot which erupted on the belly of Saturn three years ago (TIME, Aug. 21, 1933). The orbit of Pluto was theoretically predicted by professionals, but that outermost planet was actually discovered by an amateur named Clyde W. Tombaugh while working at Lowell Observatory in Arizona...
Computations of the comet's orbit were made by Fred L. Whipple, instructor in Astronomy and Leland E. Cunningham on the basis of photographs taken at the Cambridge and Oak Ridge stations...
Since its discovery Friday, computations of the stellar body's orbit and other conclusive calculations have already been made by the Observatory. The local astronomers were only second on the scene of notion, however...