Comet Halley, which is again visiting our solar neighborhood during fall 1985 and spring 1986, was seen with a telescope for the first time on August 15, 1682, by John Flamsteed, assistant observer at the Greenwich Observatory near London. Jean Picard and Philippe de La Hire saw it at Paris on August 26, 1682, shining as if it were a star of the second magnitude. Johannes Hevelius, at Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland), estimated the length of its tail at that time at 12°‐16°. The astronomers of that epoch considered the comet to be a new one that should be added to the list of all those previously observed. The English astronomer Edmond Halley, who was haunted by the idea that all comets need not necessarily describe parabolic orbits, calculated the orbital elements of the new comet and compared them to those of comets that had appeared in 1607 and in 1531 (the heavenly paths of which had been noted by Johannes Kepler and by Christian Severin Logomontanus and Petrus Apianus, respectively). Upon examining the data in Table 1, one can not but be surprised by the near identical value of the elements.