57P/du Toit-Neujmin-Delporte

Infobox Comet
name=57P/du Toit-Neujmin-Delporte


discoverer=Daniel du Toit, Grigory N. Neujmin, Eugène Joseph Delporte
discovery_date=July 18 1941
designations=1983 IX; 1983g; 1989 XIV; 1989l; 57P/1941 OE; 1941 VII; 1941e; 57P/1941 O1; 1941 VII; 1941e; 57P/1970 N2; 1970 XIII; 1970i; 57P/1983 RD6; 1983 IX; 1983g
epoch=July 25, 2002 (JDT 2452480.5)
semimajor= 3.452865 AU
perihelion= 1.729511 AU
aphelion= 5.176218 AU
eccentricity= 0.499108
period=6.42 a
inclination= 2.8447°
last_p=July 31, 2002
next_p=December 25, 2008

57P/du Toit-Neujmin-Delporte is the designation of a periodic comet. In 2002 it was discovered to have broken up into at least 19 fragments.

Discovery

The comet has many co-discoverers and a complicated discovery history due to unreliable communications during World War II. Daniel du Toit discovered the comet on July 18, 1941 working at Boyden Station, South Africa. His cabled message about the comet did not reach his employer, Harvard College Observatory, until July 27. During a routine asteroid search, Grigory N. Neujmin (Simeis Observatory, Soviet Union) found the comet on a photographic plate exposed July 25. He confirmed his own observation on July 29, but the radiogram from Moscow took 20 days to reach Harvard. The official announcement of the new comet finally happened on August 20, 1941. A few days later, it became known that Eugène Joseph Delporte at the Royal Observatory, Belgium, also had found the comet on August 19, so he was added to the list of discoverers.

A few weeks later, news from Paul Ahnert at Sonneberg, Thuringia, Germany, reached Harvard that he also observed the new comet on July 22, but it was too late to recognize his contribution.