📚 Comets

Icy visitors on long ellipses: returns, nuclei reached by probes, and the superstitions comets used to explain.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject comets in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Centrifugal force and gravitation	John Harris	1873	20
	Il saggiatore	Galileo Galilei	1623	12
	Comet	Carl Sagan	1985	12
	Did comets kill the dinosaurs?	Isaac Asimov	1988	12
	Comets and meteors	Isaac Asimov	1972	11
	Astronomy for everybody	Simon Newcomb	1902	10
	Two lectures on comets	John Winthrop	1759	9
	Between the planets	Fletcher G. Watson	1941	7
	Comets	Franklyn M. Branley	1984	7
	Les comètes	Amédée Guillemin	1875	6
	Comets	Herbert S. Zim	1957	6
	Comets and asteroids	Ian Graham	2007	6
	Comets and Their Origin	Uwe Meierhenrich	2014	6
	Lehrbuch zur Bahnbestimmung der Kometen und Planeten	Oppolzer, Theodor Ritter von	1870	5
	Comets, their origin, nature and history	Henry William Elson	1910	5
	Near-Earth objects	Donald K. Yeomans	2012	5
	Magicians of the gods	Graham Hancock	2015	5
	Observatio & demonstratio cometae aetherei	Michael Maestlin	1578	4
	An astronomical description of the late comet or blazing star	Samuel Danforth	1665	4
	Pensées diverses	Pierre Bayle	1683	4
	Über die Natur der Cometen	Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner	1872	4
	Introduction to comets	John C. Brandt	1981	4
	Physics of comets	K. S. Krishna Swamy	1986	4
	Comets, meteors, and asteroids	Seymour Simon	1994	4
	Comet of the century	Fred Schaaf	1996	4
	Meteor Showers and their Parent Comets	Peter Jenniskens	2006	4
	Catching stardust	Natalie Starkey	2018	4
	De tribvs cometis anni M.DC.XVIII	Orazio Grassi	1619	3
	Heaven's alarm to the world. Or A sermon, wherein is shewed, that fearful sights and signs in heaven, are the presages of great calamities at hand	Increase Mather	1681	3
	Die Wunder Gottes in der Natur, bey Erscheinung der Cometen, oder, Besondere Anmerckung der vornehmsten Cometen, oder, Strobel-Stern	Konrad Lykosthenes	1744	3

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.