Halley’s Comet: where it is now, and its whole 75-year orbit from 1986 to 2061

Where was Halley’s Comet when you were born?

Choose your year of birth, and the day if you like. The date stays on your device; a link you share carries only the year.

How long does Halley’s Comet spend near the Sun?

Of the 27,563 days between the two passes, the comet spends 78 days closer to the Sun than Earth is, and 35.3 years farther out than Neptune. The bar shows the whole orbit by time; the near-Sun part is the sliver at the left edge.

A planet on a near-circular orbit keeps an almost constant speed. A body on a long ellipse does not: Halley moves 60 times faster at the Sun than at its far point. Kepler stated the rule in 1609: the line from the Sun to the body sweeps equal areas in equal times.

This is why a comet seems to arrive suddenly. Halley takes 17.6 years to fall from its far point to the distance of Neptune, and 13 months to cover the last stretch from the distance of Jupiter to the Sun.

How many times has Halley’s Comet been seen?

Records identified with it go back to 240 BC. Counting 1986, the comet has rounded the Sun 30 times since then. Yeomans and Kiang, in 1981, had no observation for the pass of 164 BC; a later Durham thesis by Kevin Yau concludes that every return from 240 BC on was recorded. The chart shows the time between one pass of the Sun and the next, from the orbit Donald Yeomans and Tao Kiang computed in 1981 from Chinese and European observations; they call the 240 BC identification “probable”.

“Every 76 years” is an average. The pull of the planets has stretched the interval to 79.25 years and cut it to 74.42; the mean of the 30 intervals to 2061 is 76.7.

1066: stitched into the Bayeux Tapestry

The comet rounded the Sun in March 1066. The embroidery, probably made in the 1070s, shows it above a group of men pointing: Isti mirant stella. The next scene shows the newly crowned King Harold. He died at Hastings that October.

1301: perhaps Giotto’s star

The star over the stable in Giotto’s Adoration of the Magi, in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, has a tail. In 1979 the art historian Roberta Olson argued that he painted it from the comet he had seen in 1301, a few years before he began the chapel. The fresco carries no date or label that would settle it.

1705: “I dare venture to foretell”

Edmond Halley computed the orbits of the comets of 1531, 1607 and 1682, found them almost the same, and concluded that they were probably one body. “Hence I dare venture to foretell, That it will return again in the Year 1758.”

He died in 1742. On 25 December 1758 Johann Georg Palitzsch, a Saxon farmer and amateur astronomer, found it. It rounded the Sun on 13 March 1759.

1910: through the tail

On 20 May 1910 the comet passed 22.6 million km from Earth. Observatories announced that in the night of 18 to 19 May it would pass in front of the Sun and Earth would go through its tail; the bulletin of the Bucharest Observatory is one that survives in print. Astronomers had reported cyanogen, a poison, in the tail’s spectrum; newspapers ran with it, and “comet pills” were sold. Nothing happened.

1986: the poor view

When the comet rounded the Sun, Earth was on the other side, and afterwards it never came nearer than 62.4 million km. Several spacecraft went to meet it instead.

Every return, 240 BC to 2061

Can Halley’s Comet be seen now?

Not with the eye, and not with any ordinary telescope. In 2003 it took three 8.2-metre telescopes and almost nine hours of exposure to record it as a point. ESO estimated then that at its far point the comet would be only 2.5 times fainter, still within reach of the same telescopes.

What can be seen is its dust. Twice a year Earth crosses the stream of grains the comet has shed on earlier passes: NASA lists “two weak meteor showers each year: the Eta Aquarids in May and the Orionids in October”. In 2026 NASA gives the night of 21–22 October as the Orionid peak.

Questions about Halley’s Comet

Where is Halley’s Comet now?

On 9 October 2026 it was 35.02 AU from the Sun, about 5.24 billion km, and 35.35 AU from Earth. That is farther than Neptune, and nearly 10 AU south of the plane of the planets. It passed its farthest point on 8 December 2023 and is on its way back.

When will Halley’s Comet return?

It rounds the Sun on about 28 July 2061 and passes closest to Earth on 29 July 2061, at 0.477 AU (71.4 million km). The dates come from JPL’s orbit, fitted to observations from 1835 to 1994 and run forward; a small shift is possible.

How long does Halley’s Comet take to orbit the Sun?

75.5 years this time: 27,563 days from 9 February 1986 to 28 July 2061. The orbit before took 75.8 years. Over the recorded returns the interval has run from 74.42 to 79.25 years.

How fast does Halley’s Comet travel?

54.5 km/s when it rounded the Sun in 1986 and 0.91 km/s at its farthest in 2023. Averaged over the whole orbit: 4.8 km/s.

How big is Halley’s Comet?

The nucleus Giotto photographed in 1986 is about 15 km long and 7 to 8 km across (ESA gives 15 × 7.2 × 7.2 km). By ESO’s figure it reflects about 4% of the sunlight that reaches it.

Why is it called Halley’s Comet?

Because Edmond Halley argued in 1705 that the comets of 1531, 1607 and 1682 were one object and predicted its return in 1758. He did not discover it and did not live to see the prediction come true.

Method

The comet’s positions are state vectors from NASA JPL’s Horizons system (orbit solution 75, fitted to 8,518 observations from 1835 to 1994), taken every four days from 1909 to 2062, hourly around the passes of the Sun and every six hours around the far point of 2023. Distances are measured from the centre of the Sun. Every date and number about the orbit between 1909 and 2062 is computed from those vectors when the page is built; the rest come from the sources below.

The days of perihelion and aphelion are the minimum and maximum of that distance. Near the far point the distance changes very little from one day to the next, so the exact day depends on the orbit solution used: this one gives 8 December 2023, and 9 December 2023 is also often quoted. Dates after 1994 are a forecast of the same solution.

The drawing looks down on the plane of the planets from the north; the comet’s depth below that plane is not shown. Planet positions come from JPL’s approximate elements, good to a few hundredths of an AU here. The tail is drawn to show its direction, away from the Sun; its length is not to scale.

“As far as Neptune” and similar phrases compare the comet’s distance from the Sun with the average distance of the planet; the comet does not pass near these planets.

Returns before 1986 use the perihelion times in Table 4 of Yeomans and Kiang (1981), in the Julian calendar before 1582.

Sources

• NASA JPL Horizons: positions of 1P/Halley
• NASA JPL Small-Body Database: 1P/Halley, orbit and close approaches
• NASA JPL: approximate positions of the planets
• D. K. Yeomans and T. Kiang, “The long-term motion of comet Halley”, MNRAS 197 (1981)
• ESO, “Dramatic Eruption on Comet Halley Surprises Astronomers” (1991)
• ESO, “New Image of Comet Halley in the Cold” (2003)
• ESA, Giotto approaching Comet Halley
• NASA, 1P/Halley and the Orionids
• Edmond Halley, A Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets (London, 1705)
• A. B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (1912), chapters 282 and 293
• K. K. C. Yau, Durham thesis on early astronomical records, with the returns of Halley’s Comet
• C. Sigismondi on J. Stein’s study of Callixtus III and the comet of 1456
• Gazeta Transilvaniei (Brașov), 18 May 1910, p. 3: bulletin of the Bucharest Observatory, BCU Cluj digital library
• Science History Institute, “The Comet Panic of 1910, Revisited”
• Chet Raymo on Roberta Olson’s argument about Giotto’s star