I was just reading up on some stuff about the history of Comet 17P/Holmes (a periodic comet that abruptly brightened to third magnitude several days ago and now looks like an extra naked-eye star in Perseus, and like a fuzzy ball if you use binoculars--go check it out; if you can find Perseus it's hard to miss).
While doing that, I came up with a possible theory of how Scalzi's phrase could have come about: astronomers trying to calculate the motion of a newly discovered comet from a small number of observations will sometimes start by calculating a parabolic orbit, as a rough approximation for the motion near perihelion. So if you poked around a few web pages of this sort, you might well come across a reference to somebody calculating a parabolic orbit for what turned out to be a short-period comet.
Of course, I suppose I could ask him, but I bugged him about it once already.
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Date: 2007-10-29 04:05 am (UTC)While doing that, I came up with a possible theory of how Scalzi's phrase could have come about: astronomers trying to calculate the motion of a newly discovered comet from a small number of observations will sometimes start by calculating a parabolic orbit, as a rough approximation for the motion near perihelion. So if you poked around a few web pages of this sort, you might well come across a reference to somebody calculating a parabolic orbit for what turned out to be a short-period comet.
Of course, I suppose I could ask him, but I bugged him about it once already.