This year we have a visitor from outer space that is currently on its outward journey from our solar system. It’s the comet NEOWISE with a orbital period of 6700 years, truly a once in a lifetime opportunity for us to enjoy this rare celestial phenomenon. While a comet is nothing but a space rock made of ice and dust, the dramatic tails that these celestial bodies have make for a visual spectacle that is only second to total solar eclipses. The thing that puts them above a solar eclipse, in my view, is the rarity with which these occur.
I have been lucky to see more than one comet in my lifetime. This is the third comet that I had the opportunity to see and the first to actually photograph! The first ever comet I saw was Hale Bopp in 1998 back in India. I had been fascinated by the cosmos and its wonders from a very young age. When I read the news of this amazing celestial visitor, I quietly went up to the terrace of my apartment one night and marveled at its beauty. Despite the light pollution of Hyderabad, the comet was clearly visible in the night sky. Unfortunately, back then, we did not own a camera so I could not capture it in photograph but it was truly a sight to see.
The second comet that I had the opportunity to see was C/2011 L4 (panSTARRS) in 2013. While i missed seeing the comet when it was bright enough to be visible to the naked eye, I got to see it through my telescope during the twilight in Orange county, California. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take a picture of it.
Comet NEOWISE though, offered a spectacular show. While not of the order of comet Hale Bopp (or from what I heard, Halley’s comet), it was still a sight to see. While I still haven’t captured a good quality image, I did get a chance to get some quick snaps of the comet. Here is a picture that I grabbed last week.
I am hoping to go back out this weekend to capture some better images of the comet. This weekend is my last chance to see this celestial visitor and capture images before it makes it way back in our cosmic neighborhood 6700 years later. Not sure if the human race will survive till then given how we seem to act against our own self interest but hoping we realize sooner rather than later that earth is the only home we got and we are all one people. I would like to leave you with a famous quote (more a paragraph) from Carl Sagan reminding us of our place in the cosmos:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known”
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