The Story of a Comet Hunter's Life

    Every year when cold late autumn days or early winder days arrive, I always remember Comet Honda. Comet Honda shining in a dark gloomy sky in the 1940s immediately after the end of the war gave me a very strong impression. There were no lights in the city to illuminate the ruins brought by bombings. The stars shining extraordinarily brightly in the dark sky were the only light of hope for the future. Private first-class Honda, who had just returned from the war, lost himself in search for a comet at his home in Setomura village in Hiroshima and succeeded in making a discovery.
    It was in mid-November of 1947. He set up a 15cm altazimuth reflector in a make-shift shed near his home and was working hard. The mirror was 15cm in diameter with a short F-ratio of 6.3 and figured by Mr. Kibe. The eyepiece he used was a 40 mm Kellner with a true field of view of 1.5 degrees. Mr. Honda swept the sky operating a home-built altazimuth-mounted telescope without a slow motion control. For three hours before the dawn, he slewed the telescope horizontally over 45 degrees on each side of the direction of the sunrise starting at an altitude of 45 degrees gradually shifting down to the horizon. Mr. Koichiro Tomita, an astronomer at Tokyo Astronomical Observatory, saw Mr. Honda sweeping the sky and told me later Mr. Honda slewed the telescope fast.
    The time was a little past 5 in the morning. When the field of view was moving southward from Virgo and just about to reach Corvus further south, Comet Encke moved into the view at the 8th magnitude as he expected. It was a small tail-less image with a strong central condensation. Being fascinated, he was looking at it for a while, then moved toward the south of Corvus realizing the morning twilight was drawing near. The temperature was below zero now and observation became extremely difficult. His whitish warm breath fogged the eyepiece repeatedly. He heard a whistle of the day's first train over the mountains in the north followed by "chug, chug, chug" of a powerful steam engine running through the mountains. This made him realize that he was not the only person working at this odd time of the night. This realization, he said, encouraged him to persist with his searching. In reality he had reached his limit of loneliness from isolation and perseverance against the extreme cold.
    At this very moment, his eye caught a diffused object in the field. It was at 8th magnitude and he thought for a second it might be M68. But he realized that he had passed this globular cluster immediately south of Beta Corvi just a few moments ago without noticing it. He concluded that this fuzzy object of an 8th magnitude brightness with 3'-diameter coma was a comet and sketched the field. The morning twilight progressed in the sky and this object was soon swallowed in it.
    This was the first of the Honda Comets discovered in the post-war era. This comet rapidly moved southward and he is said to be the only Northern Hemisphere observer of this comet. The following day, he moved to Kurashiki Observatory and observed this comet closely using the 31cm Culver telescope. It was officially designated C/1947 V1 (Honda), but precise astrometric observations started on November 28 in the Southern Hemisphere. The discovery of this comet took place on November 14, though.
    The reasons for a delay of the confirmation by a third-party observer were that there were very few observatories in Japan unlike today to be able to make observations of the comet and that a discovery telegram was not easy to send. The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams was located in Copenhagen at that time, but because Japan was under the rule of the GHQ (General Headquarters) due to the loss of the war, it was required to get a permission from the GHQ to send a telegram overseas. This would lead to a delay in reporting discoveries outside Japan. There is an inside story about this. Helped by the power of mass media, the discovery news reached the outside world, though a successive discoverer in another country could have taken the credit, if there had been any delay in sending the telegram out.
    A nearby newspaper company got hold of a report of Mr. Honda's discovery and the news eventually reached the world via the Associated Press. Dr. Leland E. Cunningham at Leuschner Observatory learned the discovery and passed the news on to observatories around the world. Today any discovery is sent speedily to the CBAT, but I can imagine how difficult it had been in the exceptional political circumstances of the day.
    I learned of Mr. Honda's discovery in the newspapers. Being a mere senior high school student, there was no other way to know these circumstances. Kochi city was lying in horrible ruins following the 1945 destructive air raids and the 1946 Great Nankai Earthquake. However, the starry skies over the ruins were beyond words and frighteningly beautiful. I am a witness of these exceptional skies under which Mr. Honda and his predecessor Mr. Okabayashi observed.

    On the eve of the breakout of the Pacific War in early October of 1940, when Comet Okabayashi-Honda was discovered, I happened to be still awake, though I was a young child, and opened the upstairs storm shutter to look at the norther sky. I think it was at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. At the nightfall the sky over the city of 150,000 inhabitants turned into a perfect world full of stars and not a single light was visible. It was so dark that the low roofs of houses and starry skies could not be distinguished. The starry sky spreading over the city appeared to be covered with silvery haze of stardust. Except for occasional tiny flashes, which might be meteors, nothing changed in the sky. It was the starry sky that reminded us of the sky in ancient times slowly revolving and welcoming the dawn. This beautiful starry sky continued for 20 years, and then Comet Ikeya-Seki appeared in it.