COMET IKEYA-ZHANG FOR MY BIRTHDAY!

Cheat sheet for comet watching is at http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/img_display.php?pic=ikeya_zhang_map_020308_02,0.gif
Hale-Bopp was the last good comet I've seen. Lucky we had it, since Hayakutake came into our system at an angle that made for disappointing viewing.
H-B was a treat. Imagine a comet that is still visible even with San Francisco fog AND light pollution!
To see Hale-Bopp, my family drove out to the No Cal valley, away from the lights. H-B spanned 30-40% of the sky. It was just this huge amazing veil across the bowl of the night. I wept, seeing it. It was just so huge and so gorgeous, I couldn't help it. I didn't feel small when I saw it, I felt like my seeing it meant some part of me was going back with it into deep space, and some part of me would come back with it decades and centuries from now. Seeing it made me kin with people from years before my time, and years after, maybe some time when it will be "discovered" again, and have a new name. I felt huge, blessed, and forever.
I've only sorted today out why seeing H-B made me cry. My daughter understood it immediately. For nights after we saw Hale-Bopp, just before she laid down to sleep, she'd peel back a couple slats of the Venetian blinds, and peer out at the crack of sky visible past the corrugated fiberglass roof outside our window, and say, "G'night, tomet."