Inside the book

The title page carries a large engraved device - an elaborate interlaced monogram set within a double-ruled oval - flanked by a rhyming couplet, "Wer will GOttes (sic) Wunder achten, Findet hier viel zu betrachten" (whoever wishes to heed God's wonders will find much here to contemplate). The pamphlet opens with a preliminary address in which Voigt explains and rejects several alternative titles he had considered for the tract, before settling on the one actually printed, followed by a dedicatory address, in which he explains that twelve years have passed since the comets of 1664 and 1665, and this new comet is read as a further divine summons to repentance. The body proceeds as a continuously numbered observation log, Num. 1 through Num. 40, opening on Easter Tuesday, 17/27 April 1677, with conflicting early reports of the comet's position - variously placed in the north, the east, and the south, one witness mistaking it for Jupiter - and Voigt's own first sightings two nights later. Successive entries record, night by night into early May, the comet's rising, its visibility through cloud, its changing tail length and orientation, and its position against named constellations and stars: Perseus, Andromeda, Caput Medusae, the Triangulum, Aries, Taurus (Caput Tauri, Aldebaran), the Pleiades, and Orion, with the star Algol used repeatedly as a fixed point of reference. One entry credits an unnamed "wohlerfahrner Mathematicus" observing from a high tower through breaks in the clouds. A tabulated appendix sets the comet's daily longitude and latitude against the sun's own position for each day from 15 through 30 April, and a further passage calculates the comet's future course toward a conjunction with the sun, Saturn, and Mercury on 9 May. A discursive middle section explains the constellation figures used in the accompanying diagram, describes the comet's own color ("weisslecht ... Zinn- und Bley-farbig," tin- and lead-colored rather than silver), and traces the comet's "vertical" - the terrestrial line beneath its train - across France, Switzerland, Bohemia, Hungary, the Ottoman lands, Barbary, Jerusalem, and Persia, comparing this track to that of the Easter Comet of 1665. Voigt then turns explicitly to the comet's "Bedeutung," its meaning, and declines to prognosticate. The closing section surveys competing theories of cometary nature - comets as sublunary exhalations or vapors against comets as true celestial bodies moving among the planets - citing Tycho Brahe's parallax observations of the comet of 1577, Johannes Kepler, the Frankfurt an der Oder mathematician and physician David Herlicius, and M. David Oertel, compiler of the Brandenburg ephemerides, before closing on a devotional note with a prayer for peace. The folded copperplate, headed "COMETA Ao 1677. Mens: April: obs: HAMB.," plots the comet's daily track, labeled "Via Cometae" and dated day by day, against the ecliptic and the figures of Perseus, Andromeda, Caput Tauri, Aldebaran, Orion, and Aries, with "Prima Stella omnium" marking the lead star in the horn of Aries, and two further dotted lines comparing the paths of the Christmas Comet of 1664-65 and the Easter Comet of 1665.