22P/Kopff

COMETJupiter-family comet

ILLUSTRATION FROM PERIHELION 1.55 AU · ECCENTRICITY 0.549

[

OVERVIEW

] COMET

22P/Kopff is a Jupiter-family comet. It orbits the Sun at a mean distance of 3.444 . Its effective radius is 1.5 .

WHAT IT IS
Jupiter-family comet
HOW FAR
3.444

Its average distance from the Sun, not from Earth.

HOW BIG
1.5

The radius of a ball that would look the same size — the body itself is not round.

ONE ORBIT TAKES
6.38

One trip round the Sun.

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see 22P/Kopff for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.

[

CATALOG DATA

] 12 FIELDS

The raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.

HOW BRIGHT IT IS

What the light adds up to, measured through one filter at a time. A magnitude is a brightness on a backwards scale — the smaller the number, the brighter the object.

Albedo

THE ORBIT

The shape of the path, where the object sits on it, and the instant those figures were true of. An orbit is a fit to observations and drifts away from the real one either side of its epoch.

Orbital period
6.379
Eccentricity
Inclination
4.74
Longitude of ascending node
120.84
Argument of perihelion
162.91
Mean anomaly
188.72
Element epoch
2458545.5000
Perihelion passage
2459656.3900
Minimum distance from Earth's orbit
0.538
Orbit class
JFc

WHEN IT WAS FOUND

Who first saw it, from where, and by what method.

First observed
2013-01-17
[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 2 DESIGNATIONS
  • Comet 22P
  • Comet 22P/Kopff
[

LOOK IT UP ELSEWHERE

] 1 SERVICE

Each link carries the identifier printed beside it. Nothing on this page is a measurement of our own, so a number that disagrees with one of these is worth reporting — and a service that has never catalogued this object under this name will say so plainly.

  • JPL Small-Body Database22P

    The orbit these elements were taken from, with its uncertainty, its close approaches and every observation behind the fit.

[

CITE THIS PAGE

] DR1

This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.

PLAIN TEXT
SpaceCatalog. 22P/Kopff [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/22p-kopff
BIBTEX
@misc{spacecatalog_22p-kopff,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{22P/Kopff}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/22p-kopff},
  note         = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from JPL Small-Body Database.}
}

The values above were taken from JPL Small-Body Database — Public domain (NASA/JPL). Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue.

[

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] 8 LINKED