A medieval monk may have been the first to figure out the comet's periodic orbit. Halley's comet bears the name of the astronomer who famously first described its movements through space, but he wasn't the first to discover its periodic orbit past Earth, new research suggests. But recent research suggests that Halley was not the first to discover his eponymous comet's roughly 75-year cycle. Instead, the English monk Eilmer (also known as Aethelmaer) of Malmesbury may have connected two observations of the comet more than 600 years earlier . As a young boy in 989, he watched a comet blaze through the skies over his home in England, William of Malmesbury wrote.