In the 16th century, Tycho Brahe and Michael Maestlin demonstrated that comets must exist outside of Earth's atmosphere by measuring the parallax of the Great Comet of 1577.[179] Within the precision of the measurements, this implied the comet must be at least four times more distant than from Earth to the Moon.[180][181] Based on observations in 1664, Giovanni Borelli recorded the longitudes and latitudes of comets that he observed, and suggested that cometary orbits may be parabolic.[182] Despite being a skilled astronomer, in his 1623 book The Assayer, Galileo Galilei rejected Brahe's theories on the parallax of comets and claimed that they may be a mere optical illusion, despite little personal observation.[174] In 1625, Maestlin's student Johannes Kepler upheld that Brahe's view of cometary parallax was correct.[174] Additionally, mathematician Jacob Bernoulli published a treatise on comets in 1682.
Comet of the Century: From Halley to Hale-Bopp mobi download book
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