Comet #ISON Doom Bringer or yet another dirty snowball

In the geocentric world view of the Middle Ages, comets did not belong to the heavenly sphere – they were seen as Doom Bringer, as God’s punishment. Like the vaiable star Algol, considered evil unpredicablity had not been trusted. The archtypical fear fear of comets is as old as mankind is evident with the comet Halley, first discovered 240 BCE in China and apearing every 76 years.

C.G. Jung wrote in “A Modern Myth, Rascher Verlag, Zurich 1958: “Happens in the outside world something extraordinary or impressive, be it human, material or idea, then the unconscious contents can project on it. Projection support is provided by numinous and mythical power. ”

Comet fever reached new heights in the West in fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when a total of 21 comets was seen. Ever alert, prophets of doom began to churn out lurid pamphlets predicting all manner of associated evils. They have been at it ever since.  But this was also the time when cometary science began to take tentative steps forward. One of the contributory factors was Halley’s Comet, af cours not known by that name at that time. Comet tails do indeed flee from the Sun, no matter in which direction the comet is travelling, but the full explanation had to await twentieth-century physics.

But what paths did comets follow through space? At that time there was still confusion over whether the Sun and planets went around the Earth, as in the old system of Aristotle and Ptolemy, or the Earth and planets around the Sun, the new theory due to Copernicus. In 1609 the German mathematician Johannes Kepler reluctantly  settled the matter by calculating, from the  Mars observations of Tycho Brahe, that planets orbited the Sun along elliptical paths.  Kepler also turned his attention to comets following the appearance of one in 1607 (actually, Halley’s Comet again). Curiously, Kepler considered that comets moved through the Solar System in straight lines, although in fairness the observations available to him were insufficient to compute an accurate orbit. Despite this lapse, he had some astute ideas about the formation of comet tails:  Comets, he stated correctly, “are as numerous as fish in the sea, but we see only a selection of them”.

In 1664 and 1665 two bright comets appeared, and between them occurred an eclipse of the Moon. Such a triple omen was unique. One can almost hear the collective intake of breath in anticipation of the unparalleled disasters that surely must follow.  Threaten the World with Famine, Plague, & Warrs and indeed London was hit by the Black Death in 1665 followed by the Great Fire the year after.

In Danzig one of the greatest astronomers of the day, Johannes Hevelius, was watching the comets with scientific detachment. He published his observations in 1668 in a volume entitled Cometographia in which he theorized that comets are thrown out by the planets, notably Jupiter and Saturn, and move past the Sun on boomerang-shaped curves. Unlike boomerangs, though, they never came back.  A number of astronomers began to suspect that comets orbited the Sun on paths like exaggerated versions of the planets’ orbits, but no one could prove it before Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley.

Through his  Red Book, Carl G. Jung interwove his experience of collective madness with the collective suffering of his era. Such syntheses are rare — and just what the current mental health field desperately needs. The Red Book became Jung’s journey out of madness as well as the foundation for his analytical psychology. Even today, over 50 years after his death, Jung’s analytical psychology is a relevant, non-pathologizing method for transcending madness, while also relating individual suffering to the larger collective.

In the early twentieth century, practitioners still acknowledged the wisdom of artists, novelists, and poets with regards to the nature of the human psyche. The soul was still in need of cure, and hearts were broken as much as brains. There were perhaps five diagnoses in use — neuroses, hysteria, melancholy, dementia praecox, and mania. The Red Book challenged todays distinctions between reason and insanity on which todays conceptions of mental illness largely continue to rest and the narrow, mechanical and mono-causal view of Freud.

1910 as Haley passed across the heavensand today wiht the comet Ison once again Carl Jung and the publication of Jung’s Red Book, will be in the news again and we’ll be able to read the inner thoughts of points of astrological significance. In modern times it was discovered that comets move in orbits that extend to the boundary of the solar system. Yet understood were the chemical and physical processes that shape the appearance of these celestial bodies appearing sporadically in its perihelion. When a comet nucleus distinction , coma and tail. The core is fixed to the main body . The general opinion (hence the term ” dirty snowball ” ) , a nucleus of ice , frozen ammonia, methane and dust particles is frozen . These substances evaporate near the sun and wrap the core in a dense fog ( coma) . This cloud will turn again blown away by the sun in the opposite direction , so the tail always points away from the sun . The forces that are acting the sunlight ( radiation pressure) and the solar wind ( particle flux from the sun) .

Since light gas particles and heavier dust particles are present in the coma in the formation of different types of tail ( see Figure Hale Bopp ) . The tail gas shows in a straight line away from the sun , the dust tail , however, is bent in the direction of comet origin , as can the dust particles less speed of the sun.

The orbit of a comet follows the laws of celestial mechanics. Short-period comets with orbital periods less than 200 years moving largely within the planetary orbits , and their path can be arbitrarily inclined to the plane of Earth’s orbit . The best-known example of a short-period comet is Halley’s Comet , he has a period of 76 years .

Long-period comets have very elliptical orbits , and even parabolic and hyperbolic . In the last two cases, the passing- on of the sun is unique. An example of a long-period comet Hyakutake , he will return to perihelion and thus close to Earth until about 60,000 years ago.

On the origin of comets , little is very likely they are together with the Sun and the planets formed. The sun is ( 2.3 light years) surrounded up to a distance of 150.000 AU from a giant comet cloud. This is a long time a reservoir for future comet , it is called Oort cloud. The short-period comets , however, have largely the same large semi-major axis and the same orbital plane , the planets, and we would therefore appear from an annular belt outside the orbit of Pluto to date , the Kuiper belt.