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Nineteenth-Century Comets: Studies and Observations in Sicily

This article deals with a less well-known aspect of comet studies. It is based on original sources and casts light on some contributions from Sicily to an astronomical research topic having a strong emotional influence on common people. It provides the opportunity to remark on some aspects of the nineteenth-century Sicilian social context, such as the battle against ignorance and superstition, as well as the role of social and professional rank in naming a new celestial body. Moreover, it treats the contributions of the astronomers of Palermo Observatory to early spectroscopic observations of comets, a scarcely developed topic in studies on history of astronomy. This analysis, motivated by the intent to complete and correct some recent studies on chronicles of comets, also provides a good pretext to retrace the little known history of the Palermo Observatory across the political and social changes of that century.