Mike in the Wild

Everybody has heard of Halley's comet and its regular orbit viewable from Earth every seventy-five years or so.  (Young people, you can start looking for it in 2062.)  And many people have memories of the Hale-Bopp comet from when it first showed up in our planetary neighborhood twenty-five years ago.  But the NEOWISE comet?  No one, not a single person, nadie , had ever heard of it until the middle of last March when it was discovered by and named after the space telescope used in its detection.  Comets excite both casual stargazers and seasoned astronomers for a number of reasons.  For one thing, like NEOWISE, they often surprise us, appearing from the farthest reaches of our solar system unpredictably.  Their sneaky first-time visits are difficult to notice since comets are very small bodies, often just a few miles across.  Comprised of mostly ice and dust, they're early leftover remnants from the formation of our sun's orbiting bodies b...