C/1960 B1 (Burnham)

COMETComet

ILLUSTRATION FROM PERIHELION 1.17 AU · ECCENTRICITY 1.000

[

OVERVIEW

] COMET

C/1960 B1 (Burnham) is a comet. It orbits the Sun at a mean distance of 6968 .

WHAT IT IS
Comet
HOW FAR
6968

Its average distance from the Sun, not from Earth.

ONE ORBIT TAKES
580 000

One trip round the Sun.

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see C/1960 B1 (Burnham) 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

] 11 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.

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
580 400 ±1.2×10⁹
Eccentricity
±0.00064
Inclination
69.5
Longitude of ascending node
83.78
Argument of perihelion
273.24 ±0.038
Mean anomaly
0
Element epoch
2436988.5000
Perihelion passage
2436839.2100
Minimum distance from Earth's orbit
0.786
Orbit class
COM

WHEN IT WAS FOUND

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

First observed
1960-01-28
[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 2 DESIGNATIONS
  • Comet 1960 B1
  • Comet C/1960 B1 (Burnham)
[

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.

[

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. C/1960 B1 (Burnham) [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/c-1960-b1-burnham
BIBTEX
@misc{spacecatalog_c-1960-b1-burnham,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{C/1960 B1 (Burnham)}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/c-1960-b1-burnham},
  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.

[

RELATED OBJECTS

] 8 LINKED