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Chasing a Comet Drive, she said, and I drove. The dogs were in the back panting from their twilight run. I was a bit puffed too. She knew it was low tonight in the southwest sky - McNaught's comet. Grand in this morning's paper - snapped from a jetty on the bay facing west - with awesome numbers about distance and length and brightness and colour - but tonight's southwest - discoloured by the city's blurry electric aura - promised ill for comet-sighting. O well for McNaught in his outback observatory at Siding Spring (near Coonabarabran) where the air is clean and the nightsky crammed with all the brilliancies the South is furnished with. The lights we drove towards resolved to tall street lamps, transmitter-mast tops, and what-not as we westered. Its core, we told the dogs, is frozen water and methane three hundred metres or so. The sun is boiling steam off that and that's its shining tail. They wag theirs, whatever you say. We'd driven now far enough west to turn onto a clear freeway into the dark, under the new moon. Look west! southwest! Venus, perhaps, no comet. The tail, some say, is three million kilometres long. And city lights conceal all that. Well, patience, because this weekend we're going out of town. There on clear nights the sky shimmers with all the brilliancies - planets, Milky Way, constellations. The weekend came, we drove to Newstead, stopped. (We'd parked the dogs with minders.) Why were people standing in the dark in the middle of the cricket oval? McNaught's Comet held their gaze, its head pushed towards the horizon where the sun had sunk, the tail spread up and out, as if in falling the comet had unzipped the dark denim fabric of the sky. Max Richards, Doncaster Victoria Wednesday 31 January 2007 ------------------------------------------------------------ This email was sent from Netspace Webmail: http://www.netspace.net.au