Word: cometted
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Even now it is hurtling closer, racing toward a year-end rendezvous with the sun. By December it will be the brightest object in the predawn sky, providing early risers with an unusual celestial display. The newly discovered comet may eventually be 50 times as brilliant as Halley's comet, which last dazzled the world in 1910; its tail could arc across some 30°-or one-sixth-of the evening sky. With no effort at hyperbole, Harvard Astronomer Fred Whipple says the onrushing giant "may well be the comet of the century...
...great comet was discovered in March by Czech-born Astronomer Luboš Kohoutek while he was looking for asteroids with the Hamburg Observatory's 31-in. Schmidt telescope; at that time it was some 480 million miles away from the sun, or roughly in the vicinity of the orbit of Jupiter. In contrast, Halley's comet-less bright than Kohoutek's-was not spotted until it was about 170 million miles closer to the sun. Although the nucleus of a typical comet (which is thought to be composed of frozen water, methane and ammonia, as well...
Although the comet is now visible only as a speck of light in telescopes, solar radiation will boil off gases and dust from the nucleus as it approaches closer to the sun. In the "solar wind," the stream of electrically charged particles that continually emanate from the sun, the material from the nucleus should be swept into the characteristic comet's tail. As it reacts with the charged particles, the tail should begin to glow brightly-so brightly, in fact, that Brian Marsden of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory believes that the comet could be visible to the naked...
Hundreds of observers around the world are preparing to examine the comet in many frequencies of light -from ultraviolet to infrared. Harvard's A. Edward Lilley even hopes to detect, for the first time, microwave emissions from a comet. Above the earth's obscuring blanket of air unmanned satellites-perhaps even Skylab's sophisticated observatory-may make the most fruitful observations of all. All the observations will be aimed at determining the structure of the comet and its origin-probably beyond the planet Pluto, where billions of comet-like objects are believed to be orbiting as remnants...
...Kodachrome" is Simon's fling at whimsy, and "American Tune" his cliche. His use of The Onward Brass Band on "Take Me to the Mardi Gras" is a piece of self-indulgent authenticity which is barely necessary. There is a beautifully sung lullaby, "St. Judy's Comet," not really a lullaby at all, rather a hymn to the father who rarely babysits, and actually one of those rolling hills, green fields country songs with throwaway guitar lines. "Was a Sunny Day" seems obligatory, cute and Caribbean in music and tone -- even the phrasing approaches the West Indian lilt...