This past couple of weeks I’ve been fortunate to track Comet C/2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, alias Comet A3, from my little safe haven at the tip of the Paynetown peninsula on Lake Monroe.
That spot has been an almost daily refuge for me since I moved to Bloomington way back in 2009. The Loved One and I would bring Steve the Dog and Sally the Dog here while they were still alive. It got to the point that, every night at about the same time, Steve’d park himself next to me and grunt, as if to say, “Hey, what’s the matter with you? It’s time to go to the lake!”
Then, in 2016, when I was recovering from cancer, I’d go to Paynetown and just sit and gaze out at the ripples (and sometimes actual waves) in the water. It was calming and healing.
I told my pal Danny about it when he was getting the shit kicked out of him by cancer a couple of years later. His cancer, as opposed to mine, was metastatic, surely a knockout blow. His treatments, including chemotherapy and immunotherapy, only offered a brief stay of execution. Somehow, he kept a brave front and swore he’d beat the bastard Big C.
Danny told me one day that he’d join me at Paynetown when he’d recovered so he, too, could look out at the water and feel calm and heal. I said, “Sure, Danny,” but I knew it’d never come to pass.
Every time I’m out there now I think of Danny and how he would have loved sitting at Paynetown with me, two grizzled vets, exchanging war stories.
I got a huge bonus of late with the appearance of the comet (and, for pity’s sake, why couldn’t the astronomers make up their minds about its name?) The first couple of days when it was supposed to have appeared in the dusk sky, near to the western horizon, I couldn’t spot it. I was joined by other skywatchers including a shy Chinese college student and a fireplug of a Bloomington native, both of whom set up timed exposures on their cameras. An IU Health Bloomington Hospital nurse named Scott also joined us, lugging his two kids by marriage. I’m happy to say the kids, each of whom appears about to enter adolescence, were giddy at the prospect of seeing the comet.
That’s heartening. You hear so much these days about kids burying their noses in their devices, not caring a whit about the world around them or the sky above them.
Finally one day I glimpsed the comet. To see it, I had to look out the side of my eye. Looking directly at it was no good. It would appear as the faintest smudge against an orange-blue sky that was about to turn indigo. I whipped out my astronomical binoculars, locked them into my tripod, and swept a small circle of sky I imagined the comet to be in. Each night for about a week, when the comet came into in my lenses, I’d blurt “Got it!” like a teenager.
Sometimes a jet would streak by, right there in my field of vision, looking like something out of a science fiction movie on a journey to the stars.
The comet didn’t move or dance or change colors. It sat there in the 8:30pm sky, a fuzzy nucleus surrounded by a fuzzier coma and trailing an even fuzzier tail. All three elements of it were white, as if some cosmic painter had dabbed at the sky with a swift brushstroke of thinned-out water color.
The comet was part of a triad of sky spectacular-ness. The brilliant planet Venus to its left and a bit further left stood the stately, faint white pillar of the Milky Way, its base on the southwest horizon.
I don’t have a long-exposure, professional-type camera like the two guys at Paynetown. I only have my memory of the scene night after night, from Sunday through Thursday. Here, though, is an image I found online:
This photo was taken in Hawaii, which is a little ways past Bedford. It’s a long exposure, too, likely five minutes or more.
It’s what I saw — albeit enhanced and minus the mountain — on those nights. The scene’ll stick with me until I die.
I’d have paid a hundred dollars — hell, a thousand! — for a ticket to the show if some entrepreneur had conjured a way to monetize it. Who knows? Maybe some day Elon Musk or someone like him will buy the rights to the sky and charge us to look at it. For right now, though, it’s free and there was no better show on TV, online, or on stage last week.