It all seemed impossibly clear.
The strange thing was that my museum colleague, Gerard O'Regan, tried for several nights to see the comet with his own eyes and couldn't find it. He was in Macandrew Bay. I was in Middlemarch. I sent co-ordinates. I sent photographs. Nothing. Each night he went out, scanned the sky, and returned empty-handed and presumably muttering. We joked that perhaps I'd invented it. That astrophotography had become a branch of creative writing.
And in a way, perhaps it has.
Cameras see colours our eyes cannot see. Telescopes gather light for minutes or hours, while human vision works in fractions of a second. The night sky we share online is not quite the one we actually stand beneath.
I don't know what to make of that. Part of me misses the old certainty of simply looking up. Yet another part finds it moving. The universe has always been richer than our senses allow. Radio waves cross the room as you read this. Neutrinos pass through your body by the trillions. The comet was there whether Gerard could see it or not.
Astronomy keeps teaching the same quiet lesson: reality is under no obligation to make itself obvious.
The photograph compresses absurd scales together. The comet is only a few light-minutes from Earth. The Orion Nebula lies about 1300 light-years away. The Horsehead farther still. Yet for a brief moment, they occupied the same small patch of sky above Otago, stacked like geological strata; each layer ancient beyond the last.
Comets remind us that the sky is not fixed. Things appear. Familiar constellations are interrupted by visitors from the dark. For a few nights, the universe rearranges itself slightly.
Then it moves on.
