Abstract
When bright Comet Mrkos suddenly appeared in the western sky in August 1957, a young summer student named Brian Marsden was working in his basement office at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, then located at Herstmonceux Castle in southern England. He was not interested in discovering comets; his passion was calculating their orbits as soon as possible after they had been discovered. And over the next 35 years, Marsden’s knowledge of where every comet was at virtually any moment made him one of the most important figures in the comet field.
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References
Chapter 7
B. G. Marsden, “The Sun-Grazing Comet Group,” Astronomical Journal 72 (1967), 1170–83.
See B. G. Marsden, “Catalogue of Discoveries and Identifications of Minor Planets” (rev. Identifizierungsnachweis der Kleine Planeten) 2d ed. (Minor Planet Center, International Astronomical Union, 1986).
Marsden to Alcock, April 13, 1983.
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© 1994 David H. Levy
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Levy, D.H. (1994). The Comet Cop. In: The Quest for Comets. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-5998-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-5998-0_7
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