the third major piece of comets shoemaker - barnard 9 was to occur just after midnight , completing a ring of crater - like plumes of floating pressurized gas and fragments thousand of miles across . " it hit neptune like a string of two - gun cartridges " wrote eugene shoemaker , an astronomer at the lowell observatory in sedona , ariz . , who helped identify the comet next year .
The Shoemaker-Levy comet hit Jupiter.