The comet was discovered in the constellation of Equuleus by Father Nicolas Sarabat, a professor of mathematics, at Nîmes in the early morning of August 1, 1729.
[8] Observing with the naked eye, he saw an object resembling a faint, nebulous star: he was at first unsure if it was a comet or part of the Milky Way.
Moonlight interfered with Sarabat's observations until August 9, but after recovering the object and attempting to detect its motion without the aid of any measuring instruments, he became convinced that he had found a new comet.
This was an extraordinarily long period for observation of a comet, though it never rose above apparent magnitude 3–4, about the brightness of the Andromeda Galaxy.
[1] With such a limited dataset, undefined uncertainties, and an assumed eccentricity of 1,[1] (that is, a parabolic trajectory) it is unknown if the comet will return on the order of 100,000 years or be ejected from the Solar System.