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The return of Halleys comet in 1986 was an event that captured the imagination and occasioned an outpouring of philatelic materials around the world. The British possession St Helena was the first to weigh in with a set that commemorates astronomer Edmund Halleys (1656-1742) visit in 1677 to that remote island in the South Atlantic to prepare the first stellar atlas of the southern hemisphere. Most spectacular in this set is the contemporary reproduction of the comets image from that comic strip of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the Bayeux Tapestry, while Halleys sextant on the stamp below could pass for a quadrant. But only a few years after this visit, Halley speculated that the comet of 1682 had actually been observed before at regular intervals. He calculated the orbit of this comet now named for him, and correctly predicted its return in 1758, in a first application of Newton's laws of motion. The comet has returned twice this century, in 1910 and 1986, or "twice in a lifetime" for a lucky few. Britain was among the nations to mark the comet's return with commemorative stamps and investigated it via the space probe Giotto. Notice how Orion appears "upside down" to observers in Antarctica. The PRC stamp at the right shows the comet streaking from right to left over the curved earth and over some mysterious symbols, whose meaning is explained below in notes to the Stamp Index. |