A comet is a dirty snowball that wakes up near the Sun. Here is the rest, in the time it takes to watch one.

How it started

Every science story in this magazine starts the same way: somebody says “you have to see this”, and we go. This one began on a hot evening in July, with a full tank and no plan.

By the second day we had a notebook full of names, three rolls of film and the strong feeling that the real story was a little further down the road.

What we found

The people we met were generous with their time and suspicious of our questions, in that order. They told us where to stand, when to look and which coffee to avoid.

“A comet, explained in one evening” is what we brought back. Read it slowly. It was written that way.