The Great Comet of 1881, John Tebbutt and poor old 'Jacko'

Abstract

[Extract] The interesting letter by Richard McKim, William Sheehan and Randall Rosenfeld about the 1877 Martian dust storm published in the December 2009 issue of the Journal (on page 349)1 contains one of my favourite images, Étienne Léopold Trouvelot's splendid rendition of the Great Comet of 1881. Although Trouvelot had the good sense to list C/1881 K1 (Tebbutt) as a 'Great Comet', for some reason, many of his contemporaries did not view it as such. When I consulted 32 different books dating between 1882 and 1930 that specifically list 'great' or 'major' nineteenth century comets only 13 (40.6%) included the 1881 comet, but 3 of these simply mentioned it in passing without providing any information whatsoever.2 More telling is the fact that it is also missing from David Seargent's recent book, The Greatest Comets in History.