In May of 1983, IRAS-Araki-Alcock came closer to Earth than any comet since 1770 — about 12 times the distance to the Moon.
It was my first comet, and I saw it from the back yard of my family’s house in Palatine, Illinois. Although Palatine was small then, it was already a Chicago suburb on O’Hare’s flight path. I did a lot of complaining about the light pollution, but those turned out to be the darkest skies I’ve ever lived under.
IRAS-Araki-Alcock was a ghostly thing. It looked roughly the size of the moon, and spherical — it had no visible tail. You could see its nucleus, though … overall, the comet was like a round patch of smoke with a star caught inside. Aside from its pale blue-green color, it looked like one of the little fairy sprites that followed the UFOs around in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
Because it was so close, you could almost see it move against the background stars, like the minute hand of a clock (and believe me, I know how the minute hands of clocks move). I would try to get a fix on where it was in relation to the stars, but what my eyes were seeing would never match the image in my mind, which was always already obsolete.
Having spent so much of my youth with my developing brain focused on the sky, it felt a little perverse to have something new up there, especially something that moved so fast. I could feel in my bones why comets were regarded as disturbing omens of bad things to come.
Mostly, what it looked like was … and this was the most remarkable thing … it looked like an evaporating bit of ice about 12 times as far as the moon. Although I knew more than enough about astronomy to know why it had to be silent, I remember being amazed at its silence. It just slipped on by.
Editor’s Note: This morning, my wife got her copy of her latest publication, a poem entitled “We Seek a Shepard or a Sign” in Court Green #4, a literary journal from Chicago’s Columbia College. Check it out.
This is installment 17 of a 28-day experiment. The Celestial Monochord is trying to post once a day, sort of like a blog is supposed to do.