Discovery of Great Comet of 1882

The Great Comet of 1882 was one of the brightest comets of the nineteenth century and a member of the Kreutz sungrazers, a family of comets that pass extremely close to the Sun and are probably fragments of one ancient parent body. It was widely observed in the Southern Hemisphere in September 1882, when it became bright enough to be seen in full daylight near the Sun. After its closest approach the nucleus broke into several pieces. At the Cape Observatory, the astronomer David Gill photographed the comet, and the star-filled background of the photographs inspired him to make a photographic survey of the southern sky, which became the Cape Photographic Durchmusterung, a landmark in astronomy.

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