When I was up in Oregon recently fooling around with wax, it was cloudy down here in Monterey. But the day I got home, the skies cleared—so David and I went comet hunting. And we found this:
We went to a relatively dark blufftop on Monterey Bay and looked southwest between Venus and Arcturus (as a couple of FB friends instructed), and I spotted a fuzzy lightness in the sky. Binoculars made it clear that that fuzzy spot was the comet. And the phone saw it clearly. So nice!
In 1986 David and I sought out Halley's comet, up in the Berkeley Hills; in 1995, we saw comet Hyakutake, somewhere very near where the above photo was taken, on Del Monte Beach; and in 1997 we saw Hale-Bopp, from up on Laureles Grade and again on I-80 as we crawled along in slow traffic and kept marveling that the comet seemed to be beating us to our destination, a ski lodge near Tahoe.
Hale-Bopp was visible for 18 months. I only remember seeing it twice. Why didn't we go say hello to it every night?
This one, familiarly known as Atlas, is already headed back out into the universe, after a quick visit. I wonder who or what will be around to see it when it returns in 80,000 years.
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