The great comet of 1680 illumines the sky above Nuremberg. One person among the onlooking crowd observes through a hand-held telescope. This was the first comet to be discovered by a telescope. Gottfried Kirch, a German astronomer, first saw it on November 14, 1680. The comet reached its peak brightness at the end of December 1680, and became visible even in daylight. Isaac Newton later used this comet’s trajectory to test Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.