Our Next Comet

Especially when our son still lived at home, we were meteorite and comet watchers. I had to check the internet for when we might be able to observe a comet next. This information is from EarthSky.org:

For observers in the Northern Hemisphere, Comet Tempel 2 will become visible late at night in early August. Southern Hemisphere watchers will be able to see it from early night, enjoying the best views during closest approach to Earth as the comet will be higher in the eastern sky. You’ll likely need binoculars or a small telescope.

Comet 10P/Tempel 2, discovered by Wilhelm Tempel on July 4, 1873, will reach perihelion – its closest point to the sun – on August 2, 2026. It will be closest to the Earth a day later. This short-period comet orbits the sun every five years. 

Comets of a Lifetime is a story in Chapter 1: Celestial of The Immigrant and the Outlaw: A Collection of Stories from America’s Heartland. 

Comets of the Lifetime

Only a ball of dirty snow, they tell us, formed in the cold far reaches of the universe. It wasn’t much to look at but I was out every night it was clear enough to check on it. Sure enough. All five clear nights it was easy to spot–even in the street-lighted suburbs–but not much to look at. A smudgy area that caught your eye, That’s about all.

      Then why all the fuss? Well, because you can’t see most comets without a telescope. And just how many comets have you seen in your lifetime? I’ve been around, hmmm, half a century and this is only my third dirty snowball from outer space.

      But it was startling to see how far it had traveled from night to night–93,000 miles per hour, they tell us.

      Yuki Hyakuutake, an amateur sky watcher in Japan, was so elated when he discovered this comet January 30 that he was afraid he would have a heart attack and die without anyone knowing what had caused it. He lived to alert the world to the “new” celestial visitor that now bears his name. 

      They tell us that this particular comet “visited” our planet 9000 years ago. I wonder how they confirmed that–and is that give or take a decade or so?

      The spring my sis and I played the duet “Blue Boogie” at our piano recital, my eyes had already beheld my first comet just a few weeks earlier. Because of cloudy weather, it was visible only one night over the neighbor’s farmstead to the northwest. 

      The shock later that year about Sputnik, launched by the Soviet Union, overshadowed the comet and I forgot about it until about fifteen years later.

      My mother had me help her pick out a telescope for her grandson for Christmas. When I mentioned my childhood comet to the salesman, he thought I had probably seen Comet Arend-Roland. Old newspaper accounts from April 1957 confirmed it.

      In 1986, the year our son Dan won the Iowa State Fair Spelling Bee and collected tiny pink plastic “Muscle Men’ and got his Cub Scout Arrow of Light, he may also have seen Comet Halley. . . . 

Any more comet watchers out there? 

The entire story was first published in the Valley Courier in April of 1996, and now in The Immigrant and the Outlaw: A Collection of Stories from America’s Heartland.