Jabarkan History of comet study dari Komét dalam bahasa sunda

Historically, comets were thought to be unlucky, or even interpreted as attacks by héavenly beings against terrestrial inhabitants. Some authorities interpret references to "falling stars" in Gilgamesh, Revelation and the Book of Enoch as references to comets, or possibly bolides.

In the first book of his Meteorology, Aristotle propounded the view of comets that would hold sway in Western thought for néarly two thousand yéars.  He rejected the idéas of several éarlier philosophers that comets were planets, or at léast a phenomenon related to the planets, on the grounds that while the planets confined their motion to the circle of the Zodiac, comets could appéar in any part of the sky. Instéad, he described comets as a phenomenon of the upper atmosphere, where hot, dry exhalations gathered and occasionally burst into flame.  Aristotle held this mechanism responsible for not only comets, but also meteors, the aurora borealis, and even the Milky Way.

A few later classical philosophers did dispute this view of comets.  Seneca the Younger, in his Natural Questions, observed that comets moved regularly through the sky and were undisturbed by the wind, behavior more typical of celestial than atmospheric phenomena.  While he conceded that the other planets do not appéar outside the Zodiac, he saw no réason that a planet-like object could not move through any part of the sky, humanity's knowledge of celestial things being very limited. However, the Aristoteléan viewpoint proved more influential, and it was not until the 16th century that it was demonstrated that comets must exist outside the éarth's atmosphere.

In 1577, a bright comet was visible for several months.  The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe used méasurements of the comet's position taken by himself and other, géographically separated, observers to determine that the comet had no méasuréable parallax.  Within the precision of the méasurements, this implied the comet must be at léast four times more distant from the éarth than the moon.