It is March 15, 1997 and "Night of the Comet" at the downtown Museum of Science and History, called the Children’s Museum during my elementary school years. I wait in line with my best friend Paul, hoping that Comet Hale-Bopp will break through the clouds by the time we reach the telescopes on the roof. A mother chastises her pouting teenage son in line ahead of us. There is one couple, one little girl in a sundress, but the rest are tired-looking middle-aged people wearing hip-packs like it was Disney World. A man peaks out from behind a door and says we can come through the back entrance, so Paul and I run to follow him through the labyrinth of stairs and doors. I recognize classrooms where I once took summer courses on bugs and fossils. Finally we reach the roof where a few medium-sized telescopes sit on tables. All of the kids are up here, cutting in line, playing with the alignment. The staff has its hands full. One man says, "Is anybody interested in looking for the comet?" The growing crowd nods tolerantly. "It’s right over there, over the top of the bridge...behind the cloud." We groan, and step up to look at the moon, which looks unnaturally white and shadowy. Just like a picture.

Paul and I troop inside, waiting for the next planetarium show. We buy small rubber frogs and salamanders, and consider the Astronaut Ice Cream, a staple for any field trip to the museum. Now they have three flavors, and cinnamon apple chips besides. "They’ve gone gourmet," Paul sighs, and decides against it. We weigh ourselves, test our flexibility, and watch our heartbeats on a rubber heart that mimics your pulse. A man with a handlebar mustache shows off his coral snake and his "baby" bird tarantula, already the size of a man’s hand. He tells an onlooker that the spider recognizes him and a few other people, and that she gets in a "mood" sometimes. I ask him what her name is, and he thinks awhile. "Dora," he says.

The planetarium line stretches around the building by the time we get there, giving us flashbacks of Disney’s Space Mountain. When we finally sit down, my right knee is decidedly cramped from standing. We watch "Comets are Coming," a history of comets, including a few interviews with astronomers around the world. A poem catches my attention, and afterwards, I talk to Pat McQuillan, Planetarium Director, to see if he remembers the author. He says it’s Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is late, and Paul and I eavesdrop to find out if the clouds are gone. They aren’t, so we leave the Museum around 10:45 p. m. to fight our way out of the incredibly crowded parking lot.
The next day, I search the World Wide Web for Hopkins’ poems, but I can only remember a few phrases. None of the poems match. I find Pat’s email address and ask him for the lines. He sends back:

But when she sights the sun she grows and sizes
And spins her skirts out, while her central star
Shakes its cocooning mists; and so she comes
To fields of light; millions of traveling rays
Pierce her; she hangs upon the flame-cased sun,
But then her tether calls her; she falls off,
And as she dwindles sheds her smock of gold
Amidst the sistering planets...
And then goes out into the cavernous dark.

Later, the Hopkins Society in Ireland tells me it is more likely to be by a 20th century American poet, not their 19th century Romantic. I delve back into the Web, but it is useless. I am probing one "cavernous dark" to satisfy my love for another one. The Web is even less yielding than the sky. Pat sends me the address of the Adler Observatory in Chicago, which wrote the program for the Museum, and suggests I tell them about my findings. I shrug and send them a note, and while I’m at it, fire off a few questions to addresses of observatories I found in a Sky and Telescope magazine.

Except for a few occasional dallyings, I had all but forgotten about my love for the sky, first kindled during Comet Halley’s appearance in the early spring, 1986, until Hale-Bopp brought it all back. Nine years old when Halley’s Comet made its latest trek through the inner solar system, I was mesmerized by the idea of seeing this rare phenomenon. Night after night it was the same scene. I remember it like this: My dad and I struggle out of bed at 4 a.m. to search the skies. I stand shivering in the cool morning air, wrestling with Dad’s heavy black binoculars. The smell of Dad’s chest-of-drawers clings possessively to the binoculars, adding to my middle-of-the-night nausea. Later in life, after a year of high school, I finally learned to manage the early morning regime of waking up before 6 a.m. and safely keeping my food down; tonight I have no such luck. But for now, I am on a mission, probing the Pleiades--the Seven Sisters--for signs of the comet.

On our last night, I think I see it: small, fuzzy, unimpressive. Dad excitedly takes the binoculars to look for himself, but sees only the Seven Sisters, blinking back silently, concealing our prize. I feel bad for Dad, because I know it will be 76 years before Halley returns; maybe I will see it, but him, certainly not. We hop in his car and drive to Cecil Air Field in hopes of a better view, but the sun is rising, large and red, as we arrive. We settle for Dunkin’ Donuts instead. I am mad at the comet for being so elusive, and pretend that I don’t care if I ever see it. But, truthfully, I had caught the bug.

During my quest for Halley’s Comet, my grandmother heard about my fascination and told me about her friend, Esther Rothrock, who was 100 years old and saw the comet in 1910. I asked "Grandma" Rothrock to tell me all about it, and she wrote back with her story. She was 24, engaged, and at a friend’s house when someone said, "Let’s go see the comet." It looked like a large yellow star, with a long tail, spreading wide at the end. One night, the earth was supposed to intercept the tail, "and then the earth would blow up and be no more." So she and her mother took their bedding up on the roof to watch the end of the earth, but after a long time of waiting, nodded off to sleep. "And when we woke up," she wrote," nothing had happened."

Nearly 11 years later, comets are again in the spotlight with the appearance of the latest Great Comet, Hale-Bopp. Despite their increased exposure, comets are still a mystery to most people. The word "comet" comes from kome, Greek for "hairy." A comet has three main parts called the nucleus, coma, and tail. Fred Whipple called the nucleus a "dirty snowball" of oxygen, water, carbon dioxide and monoxide solids and dust. Nearing the sun, the crust wears down and the chemical solids begin vaporizing from their solid state, or "sublimating," like dry ice. Gas and dust erupt from the core of the nucleus, forming a coma averaging 10,000 miles across, but possibly as much as 1 million miles across--larger than the sun.

Most comets never evolve beyond this stage. Once close to the sun, however, the solar wind blows dust back from the coma, forming one or more tails, one made of dust, the others of ionized gases. Comet tails usually stretch over a few million miles, although the Great Comet of 1843 claims one at twice the distance of the earth to the sun, 186 million miles. People once feared that should the earth intercept the tail of a comet, as it did in 1910 during the appearance of Halley’s Comet, the carbon monoxide in the tail would poison the atmosphere. But, as Alan Hale, co-discoverer of Hale-Bopp, says in Everybody’s Comet, "There is more gas in a matchbox full of air than there is in several cubic miles of a comet’s tail."

According to Hale, there may be two or three comets visible to amateur astronomers on any given night, while professional observatories may track up to two dozen. A comet visible to the naked eye may only be a once-a-year phenomenon, while the even more obvious Great Comets may show only once every two decades (Hale, 15). Such comets do not necessarily have to be large. Their status hinges on their orbit, perihelion point, and "intrinsic brightness."

A comet’s orbit can take many forms, but most have elliptical orbits, like the planets. A few travel on a parabola, which may never bring them back to the inner solar system, or on a hyperbola, which slingshots them out into the galaxy forever. It is a comet’s perihelion, or point closest to the sun, that dictates its success in forming a coma and a tail. The comet with the closest perihelion recorded, 400,000 miles, actually hit the sun. Without some degree of intrinsic brightness, or brightness produced solely by the comet, comets might look just like asteroids. The brightest comet on record, the Great Comet of 1811, impressed Tolstoy enough to include it in War and Peace.

Eventually, the dust from a comet’s tail spreads out along the comet’s orbit. When the earth travels through these dust trails, the dust travels through the atmosphere as meteors. If the meteors come specifically from a comet’s trail, it will appear that all of the meteors come from one place. Halley’s comet is believed to parent the Eta Aquarid shower on May 3 and the Orionids on October 21. Comet Temple-Tuttle, which passes perihelion in 1998, parents the Leonids. It is not certain which shower Hale-Bopp parents, but Hale believes that it is the Quadrantids of January 3, one of the strongest meteor showers with 100-150 meteors per hour.

In the fall of 1993, the idea of seeing my first meteor shower briefly drew me back to the sky. My ex-boyfriend Richard and I sat in a small park in between the Museum of Science and History and the Riverwalk, staring intently at the light-polluted sky. He wanted me to take him back and thought the Orionid meteor shower would change my mind. We sat and waited for an hour, but the lights from the city were too strong. We finally saw one or two meteors and headed back into town. When we got to my house, my parents talked about all the meteors they saw from our roof. I cuffed Richard on the arm for making me miss the whole thing and jokingly said, "Thanks alot." I didn’t take him back.

Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp discovered their comet, designated Comet C/1995 O1, in late evening of July 23, 1995. Hale, a professional astronomer, spotted it near the M70 cluster with a large telescope set up in his driveway in Cloudcroft, New Mexico. Bopp, an amateur that had never even seen a comet before, found it with a friend’s telescope in Stanfield, Arizona. The comet was somewhere near Jupiter. On July 26, the comet was officially named Comet Hale-Bopp, and astronomers released a preliminary orbit. By the end of September, the Hubble Space Telescope sent back the first pictures of the comet. In May, 1996, Comet Hale-Bopp entered the naked-eye sight field, spotted first from Hawaii.
After the initial orbit calculations, scientists estimated that Comet Hale-Bopp last passed through the inner solar system nearly 4,200 years ago. However, this trip brings it quite close to Jupiter, altering its orbital period to 3,400 years. Jupiter’s gravity affects the orbits of every comet that travels through the inner solar system. Early in 1997, the comet traveled well inside Earth’s orbit, while Earth, on the other hand, was nowhere near the comet, on the other side of the orbit. The closest Hale-Bopp has come to the earth this trip was March 22, passing at 120 million miles. It reached perihelion on April 1.

Some scientists estimate Hale-Bopp’s coma at 1 by 1-and-a-half million miles, and the nucleus between 40 and 70 kilometers across. Scientists are still guessing as to the activity in the nucleus, which appears to be tumbling in a complex way. Similarly, Halley’s nucleus rotated in three different directions at three different speeds. After perihelion, and Hale-Bopp may even become a daylight object. Fortunately for observers, the earth is along side the comet in its orbit, giving a broadside view of the tail. Comet Halley’s 1986 trip produced a less-than-impressive view compared with that of 1910 because the earth sat opposite of the comet, concealing the tail and creating the common "fuzzy star" picture. Such a disappointing display is called a "fizzle."

During the spring of 1995, I viewed a "fizzle" in my first confirmed comet sighting. At the end of my driveway and armed with the smelly binoculars, I looked for Comet Hyukatake. Astronomers expected it to be impressive because of its size. Mom borrowed the binoculars for a minute and found it right away. "Look! There it is!" She pointed across the street, above the neighbors’ house. It was large, but very fuzzy, so I put on my glasses. They didn’t help--it looked the same. Finally, I could say for sure that I’d seen a comet, but it was not what I thought it would be. It just looked like a blob. I was disappointed, but decided that was probably just how it was supposed to look from Earth, and went inside. Later, I learned that the earth was in a similar position to Hyukatake as it was to Halley, hiding the tail from view.

Most astronomers believe that comets are "planetesimals" left-over from the creation of the universe. Jan Oort, a Dutch astronomer, theorized in the 1950’s that these planitesimals lay dormant in a "vast spherical cloud" at the furthest parts of the solar system, until some gravitational influence, perhaps that of a nearby star, slings one into motion. Scientists estimate that the Oort Cloud, as it is now called, may extend for tens of thousands of AU’s (1 AU=93 million miles) and contain several trillion potential comets in its "cosmic deep freeze." Gerard Kuiper theorized around that same time that there may be a belt of dormant comets in the inner solar system, just beyond Neptune. The "Kuiper Belt" may account for short-orbital period comets, including over 120 members of the Juvenal family; the Juvenal comets have been captured by Jupiter’s gravity and usually have an orbit of 6 to 8 years or less. Preliminary photographs suggest the Kuiper Belt may contain over 100 million comets.

On its first trip out of its parent belt, a comet must be "broken in," or burn off its initial layer of gases to expose the crust to the sun. This layer may create the appearance of a seasoned comet, leading to certain expectations of greatness, but as it nears the sun, the truth becomes obvious, and it is also deemed a fizzle. This is what happened with Comet Kohoutek in 1973--it was only a beginner. But, as Whipple said, "If you must bet, bet on a horse, not on a comet."

In the early spring of 1997, I began my search for Comet Hale-Bopp. Once again, I shivered in the evening air. But this time it was only because I still wore shorts from the warm, humid day. Gripping Dad’s binoculars, I searched the night sky randomly, hoping to get an early glimpse of Comet Hale-Bopp. "Maybe here, maybe there, maybe...hmm..." I swung the binoculars wildly from east to west, looking for the Great Box constellation. In truth, the only constellation I recognized was Orion with his three-star belt, until I bent backwards and found the Pleiades. My neck ached and my arms shook, making all the stars look like comets. My neighbor called to me, asking what I was doing, and we talked for a while. I looked back to the sky, but saw nothing except stars, and headed inside, deflated again.

When a comet is discovered, it is named after its discoverer(s) up to a maximum of three names. Currently, the top three single comet discoverers are David Levy at 8, Don Machholz at 9, and William Bradfield of Australia with 17. Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker, along with other assistants, including Levy, discovered 32 comets in an 11 year period.

On March 28, 1997, my email sign-in said there were messages waiting. I found my first answer from the questions I sent to observatories. Charles Morris, who runs the Comet Observation Home Page, wrote me from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. He has seen about 250 comets, the first one being Ikeya-Seki in 1967. He said it was a thrill to see, but it was Comet Bennett in 1970 that hooked him. The space program drew him to astronomy, a BS in astrophysics and an MS in atmospheric science, but the low availability in jobs turned astronomy into a hobby. I was elated to get an answer so quickly, then signed off and vainly tried to find the poem again.

Is it possible that a comet will one day hit the earth? Newscasters always find a way to fit this story in with every appearance of a comet, especially after Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter in 20 pieces. One scar it left spanned the length of the earth. John Chambers of the Center for Astrophysics in Chicago found a likely suspect for a comet/earth collision--Comet Swift-Tuttle, parent of the Perseids. He says, "On or about September 15, 4479, the comet will pass so close to the earth that it is impossible to predict [the comet’s] motion after that point." So, brace for impact, Earthlings, in a little under 2,500 years, those fears may come true.

On March 29, 1997, I checked my email again to find another message. Surprise! It was a message from Don Machholz in Colfax, California, second place comet-finder in the world. He said he got his first telescope when he was 8, and saw his first comet, Comet Abe, in 1968. Like Morris, he was impressed by Comet Bennett and decided on astronomy as a hobby due to low availability of jobs. After publishing a few photographs in astronomy magazines, he decided to take on a comet-finding program "as long as it was enjoyable," and after 1,700 hours of searching, discovered his first comet. After 5,900 hours of searching, he’s found nine comets in total, the last one in 1994. He’s written three books and writes a monthly column called "Comet Comments" for newsletters and America Online.

He said that in his public speeches, he gets everything from "extreme respect to indifference," and hopes to entertain and inform the crowd. He said, "From time to time I set up telescopes in Colfax and ask the public to come out and view the stars. I love doing that.... We expect about 500 people tonight...." He talked to me like I was an old friend, telling me his life and thoughts over four pages. Then he closed, "I have no idea how many comets will come my way. If none do, I will still enjoy searching for them. Life, including my comet work, has been good to me and no one is more thankful for that than me."

As a comet heads back out into the galaxy, the nucleus shuts down until it once again reaches towards the sun. Eventually, it may totally shut down or break apart. Comet Hale-Bopp should disappear from the northern hemisphere by the end of May, 1997, still showing off for the southern hemisphere for a few more months. In June, Encke’s Comet, with the shortest cometary orbit known at six-and-a-half years, will travel in front of Hale-Bopp’s tail and later pass Earth at 17 million miles. Hale-Bopp will later reappear as it leaves the solar system, beginning to shut-down in late 1998, finally disappearing to this generation in the first decade of the 21st century.

The skies are clear for what I hope will finally be my first sighting of Hale-Bopp. Mom and I head out to the driveway with the binoculars again. We wander across the yard, trying to see around the trees blocking the lower atmosphere. When we walk across our neighbor’s yard, she spots it, low in the horizon. I put on my glasses and stare in amazement. Gone are my visions of hairy stars. The coma is an asymmetrical chunk, glowing white like the moon on one side. A soft hazy tail stretches back, catching my fascination in its wake. My adrenaline surges, and it is as if I am caught between one second and the next. I don’t even want to breathe. All of the research in the world cannot explain this surreal whiteness now burning its image forever in my mind. I run to my car and pull out my camera and tripod, hoping to catch this beauty in black and white. It is not until afterwards that I realize that in my amazement, I had set the camera aperture for a day-time setting.

I try again a few days later at Jacksonville University, training the camera over the St. Johns River. The comet dips into the dusty light pollution of the city, hovering over a power plant, teasing me. I snap off a few more shots and lay my camera in the back seat of my car. I know I have a few more weeks after the comet passes perihelion. Comet Hale-Bopp hasn’t escaped me yet.