CRUMMY OLD WINE DEPT: buy your ticket to see Halley's Comet!

Comet Halley (1P/Halley) as it appeared to the embroiders of the Bayeux Tapestry (actually an embroidery) before the Battle of Hastings and the Norman conquest of England in 1066. In Panel 15, astrologers gaze up at it and the legend reads:

Isti mirant stella
These men gaze at the star

from Wikipedia:

1066: The comet was seen in England and thought to be an omen: later that year Harold II of England died at the Battle of Hastings. Thus it was a bad omen for Harold, but a good omen for William the Conqueror. Shown on the Bayeux Tapestry, and the accounts which have been preserved represent it as having then appeared to be four times the size of Venus, and to have shone with a light equal to a quarter of that of the Moon. This appearance of the comet is also noted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Having first seen it as a young boy in 989, Eilmer of Malmesbury declared prophetically in 1066:

"You've come, have you?…
You've come, you source of tears
to many mothers, you evil.
I hate you! It is long since I saw you;
but as I see you now
you are much more terrible,
for I see you brandishing the downfall
of my country. I hate you!"

Chaco Native Americans in New Mexico recorded this 1066 comet in their petroglyphs.

Hey! Look what I found! At first I thought I'd get a little cock-tease of 2 paragraphs, and then an invitation to buy the whole article for $4.95 . No way. I wrote the fucking thing, no way am I paying $5 for it again.

I'd read a little something in "Sky & Telescope" about Northern Hemispherites making advance reservations to places in the Southern Hemisphere with good seats for the flyby of Comet Halley (1P/Halley). It inspired me to try to squeeze a little money out of The New York Times with a travel article.

By the time I finished the article, I was totally obsessed with going to the Southern Hemisphere to see the goddam thing myself. We settled on Australia. The other top spots: Chile was at that time under the dictatorship of Generalissimo Pinochet, and I don't like my night sky viewing interrupted by the shrieks and screams of tortured and murdered political prisoners. Ditto South Africa, which was still in its Apartheid era. To the best of my knowledge, Australia has not tortured large numbers of its residents since Captain William Bligh was Governor-General and Botany Bay was in full swing as a prison colony.

Australia was just grand. I know I'm going back again. We took the Ghan train due north from Adelaide (lovely, lovely city) through the desert to Alice Springs. Next time I'll take the India-Pacific train all the way to Perth.

I have serious issues with trains, comets, polar bears and volcanos. And ships and ferries. The Australians threw in kangaroos for free!

In Alice Springs, I met a lawyer who represented the Aborigines of that area. They didn't like the comet at all, he said. They thought it was a nasty old man in the sky throwing rocks down on Earth, and they wanted it to leave quickly.

Before laughing at this amusing superstition, remember that until Edmond Halley demonstrated (years after his death, when his prediction of Halley's return was proven correct) that comets were solar system objects that obeyed Kepler's Laws exactly as the planets do, the most educated Europeans believed comets were omens of the deaths of monarchs, of defeat in war, of plagues, of the births of great princes, yadda yadda. Our sophisticated scientific understanding of the nature and behavior of comets beats the Aborigines by about 200 years.

Hey! Check out who the Big Science Guest Star was on the Royal Viking Pacific cruise to see the comet!!!

IN OTHER
SOLAR-SYSTEM
SHATTERING NEWS:

Large areas of the floor of my office are now visible, and BOTH copies of Bowditch's American Practical Navigator have surfaced, so Jim O. can claim his the next time he drops by. My nervous breakdown attendant to cleaning up this ghastly Slough of Despond is nearing an end. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

That's what optimists used to say about the American military effort in South Vietnam during the war. That's what optimists are saying about the American military effort in Iraq and Afghanistan right now.

Are you an optimist?Do you think we'll win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Will we have the boys home by Christmas? Will we have the boys and girls home by Christmas 2008? Will we have the boys and girls home by Christmas 2009? Will we have the boys and girls home by Christmas 2010? Will we have the boys and girls home by Christmas 2011? Will we have the girls and boys home by Christmas 2012? Will we have the girls and boys home by Christmas 2013? Will we have the boys and girls home by Christmas 2014? Will we have the boys and girls home by Christmas 2015? Do you think Kiera Knightly is about to knock on your door and jump in your hot tub with you? Or Queen Latifah? Or Matt Damon?

* * *

The New York Times (USA daily)
28 April 1985

Travel
This Journey Comes
Once in 76.3 Years

by Robert Merkin

Robert Merkin is a novelist whose next book, "Zombie Jamboree," is to be published by William Morrow. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Travelers dream of spectacular destinations throughout the world, but the next major trek for as many as 10,000 North American adventurers may be to gaze at something entirely beyond this world -- the return of Halley's comet next April.

The best seats on the planet will be in the Southern Hemisphere. But no one will be forced to travel below the Equator for a good show, according to the astronomer Stephen J. Edberg, coordinator for amateur observations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and unofficial high lama for every amateur Halley hunter on the continent.

''For those willing to make some effort,'' he says, ''there'll be a very satisfactory view in the Northern Hemisphere.'' The effort will require an exodus from urban areas to the nearest desert or clear rural or wilderness skies, but once there, Halley's comet, nucleus and tail, should be visible to the naked eye and clear and detailed through ordinary binoculars.

But stay-at-home or globetrotter, you might as well kiss the comet goodbye if you don't catch it in 1986; it returns to this neighborhood roughly once each 76.3 years. If a 10-year-old child is old enough to understand what he or she is viewing and remember it, that child will be 86 years old when the next opportunity knocks, around 2062. (It could be worse. The Great Comet of 1864 won't be back for about 3 million years.) The British Astronomer Royal, Edmund Halley, calculated his comet's average period, or circuit time around the sun, during its 1682 visit, but this period can be as short as 74 or as long as 79 years. One reason astronomers are so keen about next year's visit is to glean information to verify their best theories about these fluctuations or to suggest better ones. The best theory to date suggests that the comet ejects gases on a schedule determined by its day-night rotation and exposure to the sun, and this outgassing changes its course and speed through space.

However, as soon as California's Mount Palomar telescope confirmed, in October 1982, that Halley's comet was back in the neighborhood, knowledgeable comet watchers were able to calculate its closest approach to earth and make their reservations accordingly. The full moon interferes with good viewing, so its dark phases will leave a best-observation window from April 4 or 5 through April 20. (The comet will be visible to a greater or lesser extent from January through April. March and April will be the best months. February will be the poorest because the comet will be too close to the sun.) Past performance and guesswork about the weather determine the best observation sites. For purely scientific considerations, Mr. Edberg of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory favors the desert of northern Chile, followed by the desert of central Australia and the Kalahari Desert of South Africa. He explains that several other factors - local politics, personal finances, language and other things to do and see in the vicinity after you've seen the comet - will naturally lead many Halley hunters to Australia. But he's been frustrated in his search for relevant weather information about Australia. ''Almost all weather observations,'' he says, ''are made during the day, so that doesn't do us any good. As Halley's will be an early morning [pre-dawn] object, we have to make do with early morning [post-sunrise] observations from most places.''

The Chilean desert, however, has several world-class optical observatories, which have kept long records of precisely the right kind of weather observations, and the viewing news from Chile is certifiably superb, says Mr. Edberg. Telescopic observers dig for gems called ''photometric nights'' - nights free from even invisible clouds, which can degrade a telescope's image of the skies. ''Chile has many photometric nights in March and April,'' he reports, and the southern Peruvian desert offers much the same prospects.

To amateur astronomers or the curious, however, there'll probably be little or no noticeable difference between observing Halley's comet from any of the appropriate deserts. ''Madagascar's weather prospects are fairly good and it should be a location of convenience for many Europeans,'' Mr. Edberg explains,'' and New Zealand will also be a fine and popular spot.''

Charles Morris, an oceanographic meteorologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has had a date with Halley's since he began hunting comets in grade school, and he is now organizing what may be the most thorough, flexible and goof-proof of Halley's tours. Mr. Morris will lead an expedition to Australia while a fellow comet hunter (and professional fireman), John Bortle, will lead another to South Africa. Mr. Morris and Mr. Bortle are among the world's leading comet observers. Mr. Morris, who was the co-recoverer (first to spot the return) of comet Faye, expresses doubts about the value of some of the other scheduled tours he has heard about. He says some are going to the wrong places or during the full moon. (Some tours and cruises that will or intend to be in the right places at the right times are listed in the accompanying box.) D o-it-yourself navigators, Mr. Morris says, should head for the Southern Hemisphere belt between 20 and 40 degrees of latitude, where the comet is guaranteed to be nearly overhead in the night sky, and then consider political stability, weather and local attractions beyond the comet. His own tour, CHASE (Comet Halley American Southern-Hemisphere Expedition), 1986 expects to capitalize on such factors with locales in Alice Springs and Ayers Rock in the central Australian desert. The South African contingent will converge on the Sabi Sabi game preserve.

The CHASE tours in Australia and South Africa will be broken down to groups of no more than 45 people, each with its own professional astronomer-guide and transportation. The Australian expedition has also added Daniel Green, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, to its roster. According to the organizers, the tours are designed to accommodate any level of comet lust, from obsessive to merely curious, and no one will be forced to worship the comet any longer than desired. Mr. Morris says he is emphatically against expensive telescope purchases - the average lay person will get maximum pleasure from good binoculars, and may regret the expense, trouble and worry involved with sophisticated portable telescopes. ''The comet will be visible all night and there'll be plenty of high-quality telescopes available,'' he says. (The groups will include dedicated watchers with first-class equipment.) ''Take along a pair of binoculars,'' Mr. Edberg says. ''The field of vision of a Questar or Celestron (the best known brands of high-quality portable telescopes) is one degree [of the night sky] . Halley's comet is an object 20 to 30 degrees long. It will overfill these telescopes' field of vision.'' That's good, he adds, for a finely detailed closeup of the relatively small nucleus or head of the comet and its surrounding fuzzy, hairlike halo called the coma, but if you've traveled halfway around the globe to see a whole comet with tail, such high-quality telescopes can actually be a detriment or disappointment - like viewing a super closeup of the Mona Lisa's left nostril.

Meanwhile, the only mildly sentient ''earthers'' with tickets straight to the comet itself are robots, and foreign robots at that. The United States has chosen not to send a space probe of any kind on a Halley's comet mission, although several American multipurpose satellites will be doing their best to sniff the comet from a distance, and the Soviet probes are carrying some American experimental packages.

According to Dr. William M. Irvine, a radio astronomer at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Soviet Union will send two probes to Halley's with local pauses first near Venus. These probes are acronymously named Vega, for Venus and Halley, whose name Russians spell with a G. One of these Vegas will be the first to approach Halley's nucleus, and the Soviets have agreed to share information about its precise location in space with the Japanese and the joint European space agency, both of whom are sending later probes to Halley's. The Soviet Union launched its two probes last December. The Japanese sent one up in January and will launch another in August. The Europeans have scheduled their probes for July.

The Europeans are also aiming for the nucleus and have named their probe Giotto, for the Italian painter. One of the Japanese probes, Planet A, will pass through the tail about 62,500 miles from the comet's nucleus. The Soviet and European probes hope to pass as near to the nucleus as 620 miles -- close enough to cause concern that some instrumentation may not survive.

At every wondrous sight, there's always a clown nearby who says, ''Yeah, but you should have seen it a few years ago. It was really great then.'' Halley's comet is no different. Each of the comet's visits offers a different view to the earth, because each time it dives for the sun - which is when we see it - the earth may be either quite close to the comet's path or far away, depending on the season.

You should have seen it in A.D. 837 when it was a mere 3 million miles from earth. (The closest that Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor, approaches is 25 million miles.) The Chinese were the first to record the comet's appearance in A.D. 66.

The last time Halley's cruised by was in 1910. Dr. Irvine says that this time around won't be one of Halley's better performances, with a nearest earth approach of 37 million miles. While this is bad news for ground-based professional optical and radio observations, it won't affect the space probes or amateurs. The Northern Hemisphere's professionals, with their huge, stationary installations, will have to look over the shoulders of their Southern Hemisphere counterparts, who will have by far the finest photographic opportunities, but even stay-at-homes won't be disappointed: their once-in-a-lifetime encounter will be merely spectacular.

Before Dr. Halley, comets appeared without warning or prediction, and the most common explanation was that they were omens of nasty historic events on the horizon. In the 16th century the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe carefully observed comets and proved that, whatever they were, they weren't atmospheric phenomena but objects in space well beyond the earth, in a class with the planets and stars. His protege, Johannes Kepler, used Brahe's reams of detailed observations to discover the fundamental laws of planetary motion, but failed to pin the same rules on the erratic comets.

Halley's analyses and inspiration led him to accuse the comet of 1682 of being the same frightening object that had appeared in 1606 and 1530, when earlier astronomer-astrologers had thoughtfully charted its sky path. He then predicted that it would return in roughly 76 years. He was right (and dead for 16 years) when it showed up on schedule in 1758. His confirmed prediction tore the veil of ominous superstition and mystery from comets forever; it ranked with Newton's feats as a stunning symbol of the power of Enlightenment science.

In our own century, astrophysicists like Britain's Fred L. Whipple have narrowed our notions of the physical makeup of comets. Unlike the planets, comets seem to be largely balls of frozen gases, chiefly methane, carbon dioxide and water vapor. They have a spherical nucleus or head and a long and far less dense tail. The ''snowball'' nucleus of Halley's comet has a diameter of about 620 miles.

The tails of some comets may be as long as 28 million miles and become visible as they pass within the orbit of Mars. The sun projects a radiation flux powerful enough to push against matter in far-off space, and the density of the comet's gaseous tail is so low that the solar radiation always points the tail away from the sun, so that, on the outbound voyage, the comet appears to be flying backward.

So why even think about flying 5,000 or 10,000 miles to see the comet? Everyone knows what a comet looks like (at least from cartoons of a knock on the head), and that a handful of times each decade a comet appears that's large enough to be seen in some detail with the naked eye. One appealing aspect of comets in general and Halley's in particular is that amateurs aren't unwanted nuisances in the total scientific picture. There are so many comets of all sizes, brightnesses and periods that a full scientific grasp of them depends heavily on the high-quality observations and tracking that amateurs love to make at their own expense. Amateurs and their small rigs rather than giant government or university telescopes are often the discoverers and recoverers of new or returning comets, and lay watchers regularly write the definitive papers on the latest developments in the comet population.

After Halley's vanishes into the void again, the robots may get the glory and the professors the prime-time interviews, but the observations and photographs of the southbound swarm of amateurs will contribute enormously to the new intimate knowledge about the most famous comet of all.

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TOUR GUIDE FOR COMET WATCHERS

CHASE Tours

The travel agent booking the CHASE 1986 tours is Lynn R. Luehrs, of Astronomy Tours International, 19143 Victory Boulevard, Suite 13, Reseda, Calif. 91335 (818-505-0448). The 14-day Australian tour will include about 40 to 60 hours of comet viewing. The price, including round-trip air fare from the West Coast to Sydney, accommodations and some meals is $3,250. There'll be side trips to the major observatories in Australia, including NASA's ground tracking station at Woollahra. The South African package costs $3,600 from the East Coast or $3,750 from the West Coast. Other Trips Among travel companies offering Halley's comet tour packages are the World of Oz, 3 East 54th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022 (212-751-3250) and Discovery Tours, the tour organization of the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, N.Y. 10024 (212-873-1440). Sun Line Cruises, 1 Rockefeller Plaza, Suite 315, New York, N.Y. 10020 (212-397-6400 or 800-445-6400) and Royal Viking Line, 1 Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, Calif. 94111 (415-398-8000 or 800-422-8000) have scheduled comet cruises.

World of Oz has trips to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Chile, and Rio de Janeiro and South Africa. Prices, including round-trip air fare from New York and hotel accommodations, range from $1,650 for a nine-day trip to Chile to $3,900 for Rio and South Africa, an 18-day package. Discovery Tours offers several land and sea programs at times when the comet will be visible. The director of the museum, Dr. Thomas D. Nicholson, will be aboard the Illiria on museum-sponsored cruises when it sails from Singapore to Athens (April 4-May 7) and from New Guinea to Fiji (Feb. 16-March 6), The Sun Line has announced that astronomers and other scientists will be on board as lecturers for eight sailings of the Stella Solaris and Stella Oceanis next January, March and April. March, the line says, ''is the optimum time for viewing Halley's comet in the southern latitudes,'' and among its cruises is one of 19 days leaving Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for Brazil on March 1. The fares, depending on cabin, range from $3,450 to $6,600 a person.

Royal Viking will have Dr. Carl E. Sagan, the astronomer, among its experts aboard two of its series of comet cruises. Dr. Sagan will sail with the Royal Viking Sea when she leaves San Francisco for a round-trip Panama-Pacific cruise next Dec. 19. Fares, which include round-trip air fare from many United States cities, run from $3,864 to $15,351 a person. Dr. Sagan will also be among the lecturers on the Royal Viking Star, leaving Auckland, New Zealand, on March 26 for a 14-day trip ending in Sydney, Australia. Fares: $2,828 to $10,220 a person. The line is also scheduling seven other comet cruises in the South Pacific from United States and Australian ports. Equipment Those who haul telescopes to distant deserts are warned by one globetrotting astronomer that equipment survivability through good packing and cushioning is one's own responsibility, not the telescope manufacturer's. If you can eventually prove a shattered telescope was the airline's fault, you may get a new one someday, but you'll still miss that intimate closeup of you-know-what.

Photographers needn't invest in expensive equipment, says Charles Morris of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. ''Dust off your ordinary 35-millimeter camera with a standard 50-millimeter or 24-millimeter lens and get a sturdy tripod and a time-release cable. With today's high-speed black and white or, preferably, color film, you don't need a motorized tracking device for excellent star-trail photos.'' A star-trail photograph emphasizes, rather than eliminates, the comet's apparent trail (not its actual tail) caused by the earth's rotation during the 15-second average time exposure. Mr. Morris plans to concentrate on this kind of photo. -- R. M.

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