juliensimon/comet-catalog

Comet Catalog

Part of the Orbital Mechanics Datasets collection on Hugging Face.

Catalog of 1,278 comets sourced from Wikidata, covering orbital parameters, discovery history, and naming origins.

Dataset description

Comets are small icy bodies that develop a coma and tails when approaching the Sun. They originate from the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud and follow highly eccentric orbits ranging from short-period comets (< 200 years) to long-period and hyperbolic visitors.

This dataset aggregates structured comet data from Wikidata's SPARQL endpoint, capturing orbital mechanics (period, perihelion distance, eccentricity, inclination), discovery metadata (date, discoverer), and cultural information (named-after entities). It covers historically significant comets like Halley's Comet and Hale-Bopp through recently discovered objects.

The data enables studies of comet population statistics, orbital dynamics, discovery rate trends over time, and the history of comet observation and naming conventions.

Schema

Column	Type	Description
wikidata_id	string	Wikidata entity ID (e.g. Q1390)
name	string	Comet name or designation
discovery_date	string	Date of discovery (YYYY-MM-DD)
discoverer	string	Name of discoverer(s)
orbital_period_yr	float	Orbital period (years)
perihelion_au	float	Perihelion distance (AU)
eccentricity	float	Orbital eccentricity
inclination_deg	float	Orbital inclination (degrees)
named_after	string	Entity the comet is named after
epoch	string	Orbital element epoch (YYYY-MM-DD)
discovery_year	int	Year of discovery (derived)

Quick stats

• 1,278 comets in catalog
• 813 with orbital period data
• 1,225 with perihelion distance
• 1,227 with eccentricity
• 728 with named discoverer
• Discovery years: 1680 – 2026
• Top discoverers: Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (56), Pan-STARRS (27), Jean-Louis Pons (26), Andrea Boattini (23), Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (21)

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/comet-catalog", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

# Short-period comets (period < 200 years)
short_period = df[df["orbital_period_yr"] < 200].dropna(subset=["orbital_period_yr"])
print(f"{len(short_period):,} short-period comets")

# Most recently discovered comets
recent = df.dropna(subset=["discovery_year"]).nlargest(10, "discovery_year")
print(recent[["name", "discovery_year", "discoverer"]])

# Highly eccentric comets (near-parabolic or hyperbolic)
high_ecc = df[df["eccentricity"] >= 0.99].dropna(subset=["eccentricity"])
print(high_ecc[["name", "eccentricity", "orbital_period_yr"]])

# Comets by perihelion distance
inner = df[df["perihelion_au"] < 0.3].dropna(subset=["perihelion_au"])
print(f"{len(inner):,} sungrazing comets (perihelion < 0.3 AU)")

Data source

Wikidata SPARQL endpoint. Comets identified via P31 (instance of) / P279* (subclass of) traversal from Q3559 (comet). Data is community-curated by WikiProject Astronomy.

Update schedule

Quarterly (January, April, July, October). Run python scripts/update-comets.py manually to refresh.

Related datasets

• mpc-comet-elements -- MPC orbital elements for comets
• jpl-small-body-database -- JPL small body orbital data
• fireball-bolide-events -- Fireball and bolide events

Pipeline

Source code: juliensimon/space-datasets

Support

If you find this dataset useful, please give it a ❤️ on the dataset page and share feedback in the Community tab! Also consider giving a ⭐️ to the space-datasets repo.

Citation

@dataset{comet_catalog,
  author = {Simon, Julien},
  title = {Comet Catalog},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/comet-catalog},
  note = {Sourced from Wikidata (CC0)}
}

License

CC0-1.0 (Wikidata content is public domain)