Discovery of 14P/Wolf

Comet 14P/Wolf is a periodic comet that was found in the 1880s by the German astronomer Max Wolf at Heidelberg. It belongs to the Jupiter family of short-period comets, whose paths are strongly shaped by close encounters with the giant planet, and it returns to the inner solar system about every nine years. Wolf was a pioneer of astrophotography and became famous for discovering hundreds of asteroids by photographing star fields with long exposures. The comet's orbit has been changed by Jupiter over the decades, altering how close it comes to the Sun and how bright it appears. It remains a faint object, observed mostly with telescopes during favourable returns.

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