Discovery of 12P/Pons–Brooks

Comet 12P/Pons–Brooks was found by the French astronomer Jean-Louis Pons, one of the most prolific comet hunters of the early nineteenth century, who spotted it from the observatory at Marseille. It is a periodic comet of the Halley type, taking roughly seventy-one years to circle the Sun on a highly elongated orbit. After its first sighting it was not seen again for decades, and it was rediscovered in 1883 by the American astronomer William Robert Brooks, after which it was recognized as the same object. It returned in the mid-twentieth century and again in 2024, when it brightened in sudden outbursts that gave it a horned look and made it an easy target for amateur observers.

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