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EntityQ915872· pop 13· linked from 576 articles

65P/Gunn is a periodic comet in the Solar System orbiting the Sun every 6.41 years inside the main asteroid belt between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter.

Key facts

Comet.asc_node
136.09°
Comet.name
65P/Gunn
Comet.image
Comet 65P Gunn WISE.jpg
Comet.caption
Infrared image of Gunn's Comet taken from the WISE observatory on 11 June 2010.
Comet.discoverer
James E. Gunn
Comet.discovery_site
Palomar Observatory
Comet.discovery_date
17 October 1970
Comet.mpc_name
P/1954 P1, P/1970 U2
Comet.epoch
17 October 2024 (JD 2460600.5)
Comet.observation_arc
71.13 years
Comet.earliest_precovery_date
8 August 1954
Comet.obs
7,963
Comet.perihelion
1.597 AU
Comet.aphelion
4.737 AU
Comet.semimajor
3.453 AU
Comet.eccentricity
0.3194
Comet.period
6.414 years
Comet.inclination
3.237°

via Wikipedia infobox

~2 min read

Encyclopedic overview

5 sections
Contents
  • Observational history
  • Orbit
  • Physical characteristics
  • References
  • External links

65P/Gunn is a periodic comet in the Solar System orbiting the Sun every 6.41 years inside the main asteroid belt between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter.

== Observational history == It was discovered on 11 October 1970 by James E. Gunn of Princeton University using the 122-cm Schmidt telescope at the Palomar Observatory. It had a low brightness of magnitude 16 at that time. In 1972, Elizabeth Roemer managed to observe 65P/Gunn close to aphelion.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “65P/Gunn” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.