l terms, Hyakutake, for example, appeared as little more than a smudge against the night sky because its tail was largely invisible gas. Before that there was Kohoutek, touted as one of the comets of the century when it was discovered in March, 1973. But its brilliance, caused by the vaporization of unusual gases in its nucleus, had faded by the time it was visible from Earth in December of that year. For all its promise, Hale-Bopp has behaved erratically since its discovery, alternately flaring up and fading, making it impossible to predict just how it will behave over the coming month.
According to Marsden, about a dozen comets are discovered every year, most of them too far away or too faint to be of interest to the public. Amateurs are responsible for a third to half of those discoveries. Some, like Levy, who has found nine since the early 1970s, spend dozens of nights each year systematically scouring the night sky for comets. But for others, like Bopp, finding a comet is pure serendipity. He and a friend were taking turns on a telescope, examining star clusters within the constellation Sagittarius from a site about 150 km south of Phoenix, when the comet drifted into his field of vision. "I had never looked in that area of the sky before," he recalled. "I was stepping from cluster to cluster, observing them for their beauty, when a little fuzzy glow appeared. I thought I had a faint galaxy or something."
But when they saw the object moving against the background stars, they quickly concluded it was a comet. Bopp drove home in a hurry and sent a telegram to Marsden's agency, reporting the find. "At 8:25 the next morning, my wife woke me and said somebody was on the phone from the Harvard-Smithsonian something or other," he recalled. "It was the Center for Astrophysics calling to confirm the report. When I hung up I did a comet dance around the kitchen table." Now, like stargazers everywhere, Bopp can only wait and watch and hope that his comet lives up to its advance billing.
Maclean's March 10, 1997