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Almost in the zenith of this sky–above the Pretchistensky Boulevard–convoyed and surrounded on every side by stars, but distinguished from all the rest by its nearness to the earth, and by its white light, and by its long, curling tail, stood the tremendous brilliant comet of 1812–the very comet that men thought presaged all manner of woes and the end of the world.īut in Pierre, this brilliant luminary, with its long train of light, awoke no terror. As he drove out of Argat Square, the mighty expanse of the dark, starry sky spread out before his eyes. Only as Pierre gazed at the heavens above, he ceased to feel the humiliating pettiness of everything earthly in comparison with the height to which his soul aspired. Above the dirty, half-lighted streets, above the black roofs of the houses, stretched the dark, starry heavens. “Home,” said Pierre, throwing back his bearskin cloak over his broad, joyfully throbbing chest, though the mercury marked ten degrees of frost. “Where can I go now? To the club, or to make some calls?”Īll men, at this moment, seemed to him so contemptible, so mean, in comparison with the feeling of emotion and love that overmastered him–in comparison with that softened glance of gratitude which she had given him just now through her tears. Pierre has just confessed his love to Natasha. It appears at the end of Book Eight (in my Kropoktin translation). The best thing about this comet is that it makes a cameo in Count Leo Tolstoy’s magnificent War and Peace, where it’s called, confusingly, the Comet of 1812.
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The comet was believed to have portended Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the War of 1812. With a coma over a million miles across, it was visible in the sky for almost a year. 6 in our Comet a Week is The Great Comet of 1811, also known as Napoleon’s Comet. Comet McNaught Images: Gallery 1 and Gallery 2.At its peak, it was the brightest comet in four decades and was even glimpsed in broad daylight by some observers. Sodium has also been observed around Mercury and the Moon forming very tenuous atmospheres.Ĭomet McNaught was named for Robert McNaught, who discovered the object last year. "The dust grains are vaporized under the intense heat and start releasing sodium atoms which then react to the solar radiation and emit light-at the very same yellow-orange wavelength of the lamps on our streets," Jehin said. Narrow sodium tails have been detected in only a handful of great comets-those that come close to the Sun and therefore are the most active. "Measurements showed this sodium emission to be extending over more than 100,000 kilometers in the tail direction and fading rapidly with time," said ESO scientist Emmanuel Jehin. The researchers were surprised to discover sodium, however. Separate observations called spectroscopy, which split light into its various wavelengths to reveal the comet's elemental composition, shows signs of cyanide, carbon, and ammonia-all expected. Snodgrass and his colleagues hope to determine the comet's rotation rate by comparing images taken over time. The dust is tossed off the side of the comet facing the Sun, creating a bright fan of material that's blown back by the pressure of solar radiation. But the dust follows a different path from the gas jets, the observations revealed. "These jets are produced when sunlight heats ices on the surface of the comet, causing them to evaporate into space and create 'geyser' like jets of gas and small dust particles, which stretch over 13,000 km into space-greater than the diameter of the Earth-despite the fact that the nucleus of the comet is probably less than 25 kilometers in diameter," Snodgrass explained.