Jose Bonilla’s 447 Sun Crossers

In 1883, a Mexican astronomer named Jose Bonilla photographed 447 strange objects crossing the Sun from the Zacatecas Observatory, and he kept shooting plates over that day and the next. The images later appeared in L'Astronomie in 1886, after people debated whether he had caught something close to Earth or something much nearer his telescope. Modern researchers now argue the most likely explanation is a fragmenting comet, with debris passing so close that only certain locations would have seen it.

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