Neowiser

Caught a flicker of the comet's tail, at long last! Only for an ecstatic nanosecond with my naked eye, more like a faint glowworm than a fountain of ice, but still. The nice fellow with the astrophotography equipment let me take a picture of his screen.



I've spent days Neowising: trudging hundreds of thousands of miles in the unspeakable heat to suitable vantage points, only to see the northwest quadrant cloud over just at sunset, breaking my heart. But tonight the sky is clear, and there's a gap in the trees in the nearby park just under the Great Bear/Plough/Big Dipper/Charles's Wain.

As I said, there was a helpful guy out there on the grass who's been tracking the comet for ten days. The other astronomy buff on site gave me much the best advice: follow a straight line halfway down from the front edge of the Dipper, just to the left of Merak. She also found my unbroken glasses in the dark in the grass when I dropped them in my flurry. She had a great big pair of binoculars mounted on a tripod, and delightedly discovered the Galilean moons of Jupiter (it was that clear) and, she half thought, the rings of Saturn. We both saw the International Space Station, which I took for a dawdling meteor.

Nine