Comets!

 Comets have always mystified people looking up into the night sky. When Comet Hyakutake was blazing across the night sky in 1996, I was lucky enough to be living on a farm an hour's drive north of Edmonton. For my family, the sky above our farm was PLENTY dark for comet-watching. We didn't need to be told where to look. The comet was big, and plenty bright enough to see.

image by E. Kolmhofer, H. Raab; Johannes-Kepler-Observatory, Linz, Austria (http://www.sternwarte.at)

On several evenings that winter we took sleeping bags out into the yard and lay on the snow, looking as the fuzzy ball of light in the sky grew bigger till it looked as big as the full Moon. We took turns with a telescope and a pair of binoculars to get a closer look. Comet Hyakutake had a wispy tail, too, that stretched till it looked as long as the Big Dipper across the sky. That wispy, hairy-looking tail on a fuzzy ball is why we use the word "comet" to describe them. "Comet" is a way to say "hairy star" in Latin. Even the Egyptian pharaohs 4,000 years ago called comets by their word for "long hair."

Our family was not the only one looking for information about comets on the Internet. What was a comet? Where did they come from? What were they made of? We found lots of sites with information from NASA and observatories. One of the best websites was written by a Canadian observatory with a program called The Centre of the Universe. The comet moved on and faded from sight, but I was still interested.

The very next year, 1997, Comet Hale-Bopp blazed across the sky. There's a great story at this link about how it was discovered by two people on the same night, who were looking in the right direction. It was wonderful to lay out in our snowy yard again with our sleeping bags and telescope and binoculars, and once again watch an amazing comet. It felt like we could actually SEE the comet moving and its wispy tail fluttering behind it.

But it was hard to get our kids to stay outside for more than about twenty minutes. Yup, this was a mysterious and fascinating object in the night sky! But they had seen the previous amazing comet just a year ago. After half an hour, they were cold enough to want to go inside. They promised to make hot chocolate -- enough for all of us. They knew I'm a science fan and just had to lay out there for a while longer.

I'm still a science fan. I still look up into the night sky, tracking planets and comets. As well, I go to the websites for space probes that have gone through comet tails like Ulysses, or the newer ones that have visited comets, like Rosetta and its lander Philae. On Twitter, I follow messages tweeted about space probes visiting the asteroids Bennu and Ryugu. There's so much to learn about space probes! And I'm still learning where to look.