The last time I peered through my father’s telescope was in February 1986. We were in our driveway in Palos Verdes, which juts out into the Pacific and is 18 miles south of the glare of downtown Los Angeles—far enough away that you can see the sky when you look up.
Halley’s Comet was racing toward its perihelion—the point in its orbit at which it is closest to the sun—at about 122,000 miles per hour, or 34 miles per second. It looked like a small, silver-gray smudge.
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