68P/Klemola

68P/Klemola, often called Klemola's Comet, belongs to the Jupiter-family group of comets. It was first spotted in 1965 by American astronomer Arnold Richard Klemola while he was working at the Yale-Columbia Southern Station in Argentina.

The comet was next seen at its predicted return in 1976, when Gérard Sause observed it on August 6 from the Observatoire de Haute Provence in France, noting a brightness of magnitude 12. In 1987, J. Gibson captured images of it on February 16 using the 1.5-meter reflector at Palomar Observatory in California; the comet appeared essentially star-like at a faint magnitude 19. Later, on March 29, 1997, Carl W. Hergenrother observed it from the F. L. Whipple Observatory, with its perihelion occurring on May 1, 1998. During its 2019 apparition, 68P reached opposition on June 14 and perihelion on November 9, displaying an intermediate level of activity compared to other known Jupiter-family comets like 78P/Gehrels.

Orbital reconstructions performed in 2024 indicate that 68P/Klemola only entered the Jupiter-family comet region about a thousand years ago, making it a relatively young comet.