Items of historical interest

From the newsgroup sci.astro:

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Pieter Kuiper: >What if the initial discovery hadn't happened?9 Jul 1994 09:57
In article <30enid$g8q@samurai.ics.com>, dbrooks@ics.com (David Brooks)
wrote:

> What if the Shoemakers and Levy had gone home early that night (as it
> were), and had missed the comet?  Is it certain that it would have been
> noticed before Saturday by some other routine observation?
> 
Yes. Actually, it had been observed a few days before by an astronomer here
in Uppsala. However, it looked funny, and he thought that it might be a
scratch on his film (all those fragments). So he decided to look again a
few days later. But then it had already been published by the Shoemakers.
:-(

-- 
Pieter Kuiper
Physics Dept. Uppsala University

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John Harper: Did a comet hit Jupiter in 1828?                20 Jul 1994 02:35
In T W Webb's "Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes" Vol I p 203-204
the following appears in the section on satellite transits of Jupiter.
(I quote from the Dover 1962 reprint of the 6th (1917) edition publ. by 
Longmans, Green. II is of course Europa, ^m means minutes of time, and
material in italics in the original has been put between _ and _ .)

 But the most surprising is a phenomenon which requires, and possesses, 
 the highest attestation. 1828, June 26, II, having fairly entered on
 Jupiter, was found 12 or 13^m afterwards _outside the limb_, where it 
 remained visible for at least 4^m, and then suddenly vanished. 
 The authority of such an observer as Smyth would alone have established 
 this wonderful fact; but it was recorded by two other very competent 
 witnesses, and (what is especially remarkable) at considerable distances, 
 Maclear at 12 miles and Pearson at 35 miles from Smyth at Bedford. 
 Explanation is here set at defiance; demonstrably neither in the 
 atmosphere of the Earth nor Jupiter, where, and what could have been the 
 cause?
 
Smyth had a 5.9 inch telescope at some time while he was a naval captain. 
(He eventually rose to be an admiral.) See W H Smyth and  G F Chambers, 
"A Cycle of Celestial Objects", 2nd ed Oxford 1881 p 387. The first 
edition by Smyth alone had been published in 1844. I know not whether 
he was using that telescope in 1828, nor what Maclear and Pearson used. 

Is it possible that what Maclear, Pearson and Smyth saw was a comet hitting
Jupiter near the limb, with a fireball being visible for 4 minutes? 
Unfortunately Webb did not here quote the original observations, which may 
(or may not) have been detailed enough to exclude this possibility.

John Harper Mathematics Dept. Victoria University Wellington New Zealand