Comet Encke

Comet Encke, also called Encke's Comet, is a periodic comet that completes an orbit of the Sun roughly every three and a third years, the shortest orbital period of any known comet. It was first recorded by the French astronomer Pierre Mechain in January 1786, but it went unrecognized as a periodic body until 1819, when the German astronomer Johann Franz Encke calculated its orbit; unlike most comets, it is named for the person who computed its path rather than for its discoverer, a distinction it shares with Halley's Comet. Its nucleus is about 4.86 kilometers across and reflects only about 4.6 percent of the sunlight that reaches it, one of the darkest surfaces known among comets, though it still develops a coma and tail bright enough to be tracked near perihelion.