1577, when Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe attempted to use parallax to triangulate the distance to a bright comet. Because he could not measure any parallax, Brahe concluded that the comet was very far away, at least four times farther than the Moon.

Brahe’s student, German astronomer Johannes Kepler, devised his three laws of planetary motion using Brahe’s meticulous observations of Mars but was unable to fit his theory to the very eccentric orbits of comets. Kepler believed that comets traveled in straight lines through the solar system. The solution came from English scientist Isaac Newton, who used his new law of gravity to calculate a parabolic orbit for the comet of 1680.