Word: cometted
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...ancient stargazers, comets (from the Greek for hairy star) were signs of heavenly displeasure. Actually, they are stray bits of debris, largely ice and dust, left over from the formation of the sun and its family of planets nearly 5 billion years ago. Skywatchers around the world got a rare chance last week to view such a dirty celestial snowball close up, at least by astronomical standards. The surprise visitor from deep space swept to within 2.9 million miles of earth, the nearest approach by a comet in two centuries...
...Like all comets, the interloper was named for its discoverers. On April 25 it was detected by the new U.S.-British-Dutch Infrared Astronomical Satellite IRAS. But the scientists were unaware of a rule requiring notification of the International Astronomical Union's central bureau of telegrams in Cambridge, Mass. Several days later, two dedicated amateur comet hunters, Genichi Araki, 28, a junior high school teacher in rural Japan, and George Alcock, 70, a retired teacher in Britain who has spotted three other new comets, identified the hazy blob in the sky and properly reported it. The astronomical establishment diplomatically...
...American astronomers, who are still deeply disappointed by the failure of the U.S. to send off a probe to intercept the most famous comet of all, Halley's, when it returns in 1986, IRAS-Araki-Alcock was a gift from heaven. At close encounter, it appeared as a blurry patch, about three times the diameter of the full moon, near the bowl of the Big Dipper...
...spring the weather has been weird: violent, Shakespearean. It might have been worse, of course. In the annus mirabilis of 1811, the air was dense with portents: a comet in the northern sky, an eclipse of the sun. The Eastern U.S. was broiled by ungodly heat and swept by tornadoes and hurricanes. Multitudes of squirrels, in the tens of thousands, were seen migrating south across Kentucky. In 1816 Connecticut had a blizzard on June 6. On the Fourth of July that year, the highest temperature recorded in Savannah, Ga., was 46°F The prevailing opinion, for a little while...
...Merlin, the hero is observed just before the Arthurian legend, when the world is a crystalline Stonehenge and miracles are the order of the day. His teacher is a sage (played by Edmund Lyndeck, a seasoned performer). The faun who haunts his dreams (Rebecca Wright) is a comet from American Ballet Theater. And his enemy, the wicked Queen, is Chita Rivera, a blast furnace best remembered from West Side Story. In the classic tradition, gorgon and wise man vie for the magician's soul and the privilege of influencing the unseen Arthur, the once and future king...