Comet Morehouse (modern formal designation: C/1908 R1) was a bright, non-periodic

comet A comet is an icy, small Solar System body that warms and begins to release gases when passing close to the Sun, a process called outgassing. This produces an extended, gravitationally unbound atmosphere or Coma (cometary), coma surrounding ...

discovered by US astronomer Daniel Walter Morehouse on September 1, 1908 (the discovery photograph was taken on September 1, but the comet was not noticed until the following day), at

Yerkes Observatory Yerkes Observatory ( ) is an astronomical observatory located in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, United States. The observatory was operated by the University of Chicago Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics from its founding in 1897 until 2018. O ...

in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. Morehouse was a graduate student at the time. It was unusual in the rapid variations seen in the structure of its tail. At times, the tail seemed to split into up to six separate tails; at others, the tail appeared completely detached from the head of the comet. The tail was further unusual in that it formed while the comet was still 2 AU away from the Sun (where distances of 1.5 AU are more usual), and that there was a high concentration of the CO⁺ ion in its spectrum.

Orbit

As is typical for comets fresh from the

Oort Cloud The Oort cloud (pronounced or ), sometimes called the Öpik–Oort cloud, is scientific theory, theorized to be a cloud of billions of Volatile (astrogeology), icy planetesimals surrounding the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 A ...

, its orbital solution is more or less parabolic; if its orbit is in fact closed, it will likely not return for millions of years.

References

Notes

Citations

External links

*
Photographs of Comet Morehouse from the Lick Observatory Records Digital Archive, UC Santa Cruz Library's Digital Collections
* Non-periodic comets Hyperbolic comets Near-Earth comets 1908 in science 19080901 {{comet-stub