I've spent the last several mornings in our parking lot and on our roof desperately searching the sky for a glimpse of Comet Hale-Bopp. Everyone isn’t suited
for comet-watchingIt started when Blaine Fergerstrom, webmeister of our online edition starbulletin.com, arrived at work all excited and announced the comet was in full view from the parking lot.
I rushed downstairs and scanned the heavens. Nothing but a few ordinary stars.
I went back to Blaine. "I can't see anything," I said.
"It's up there," he insisted. "Look toward the big city office building. It's just to the right of that."
I went back to the parking lot and looked again. Nada.
"The sun is starting to come up," Blaine said. "Try looking earlier tomorrow when it's dark."
The next day I set a reminder on my computer for 5:30 a.m. and gave myself a charley horse in a death-defying climb to the roof of our building to get away from the parking lot lights. It was a beautiful, clear sky dotted with bright stars. No comet.
"I don't know how you could miss it," Blaine marveled.
I'm nothing if not persistent. I climbed back up onto the roof -- this time armed with magnum-power binoculars. I found the celestial wonder immediately and stared at it in awe.
"Wow, this is even more spectacular than I expected," I gushed to myself. "I didn't know comets were bright red. Nobody told me they blinked. No wonder I had so much trouble finding it."
Never mind what my co-workers say. I think it's entirely coincidental that there's a big construction crane with a red warning light rising into the sky just to the right of the city office building.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I was just never meant to see a comet.
I waited years in excitement for the arrival of Halley's Comet in 1986. The late Bill Reich, a political activist on the Big Island, kept telling me how he had seen it 76 years earlier as a child and would live to see it again. He lived long enough, but I don't know if he saw it. The comet was a big disappointment.
I was living near Washington, D.C., and it was so dim that you couldn't see it through the city lights. But astronomers said you could get a decent view in darker skies away from the city.
So one cold, clear, moonless morning, I woke up my wife Maggie and our kids Treena and Jared at 3 a.m. and loaded them into the car for a drive into the Virginia countryside. When we got far enough away from the city that it was pitch black, we pulled into a field and looked skyward in the direction astronomers said.
There were zillions of bright stars, but no comet. We looked with naked eye. We looked with binoculars. No joy. We were starting to freeze and I had to find a way to salvage the situation and my pride. I found the brightest star in the sky and pointed to it.
"Kids," I said, "that's Halley's Comet. When you show it to your grandkids 76 years from now, don't forget to tell them how your dad showed it to you and how dazzling it was."
As if to rub in my skygazing inadequacy, every nitwit in the office today spent half the morning arguing about which way our picture of Hale-Bopp should point based on how they had seen it from the parking lot.
That did it. Objects in space don't point in any direction. I'm starting to wonder if all these people who claim to have seen comets are pulling my leg. Maybe comets are as phony as the moon landings, which we all know were staged on a movie set in Nevada.