I asked my grandmother about Halley's Comet. She remembered all right.

“If there was a person sick in bed, we’d have taken them out of bed to see it! Grannie said. I mean it. It was interesting. It was fascinating! I do remember that comet, you bet I do. It was kind of a moon-like affair.

“How big was it?” I asked.

“It looked kind of like a long spec of light in the dark sky. I'm not sure it looked like I expected it to, but it was exciting, she continued. We all had a lot to talk about when Halley's Comet came.”

“Were you afraid?”

“No one in the family was, so I wasn't either....”

In the old days, everyone was scared when comets came. They said comets brought bad luck, and you never knew what they might do. An artist from France drew the comet with its head as a terrifying face and its tail like long white hair. It was tearing the earth apart! Another artist drew a picture of people in China in 1910 trying to scare away Halley’s Comet with torches and bonfires. People there really did that. Imagine!...

The comet that people talk most about and know most about is Halley's, the one I asked Grannie about. It’s been around the sun 30 times since it was first discovered in China. It comes close to the earth about every 76 years, so some people have a chance to see it twice. Maybe I will, but if I do, Grannie says I’ll be 84. Eighty-four! Can that be? I’m only eight...!

Comets come from far out in the solar system and travel around the sun, I found out. Sometimes they even hit the sun. I found a photograph NASA took of a comet that did not go around the sun, but like a huge moth that came too close to a flame, the comet went into the sun and disappeared. Halley’s orbit takes it out to a place about halfway between the orbits of Neptune and Pluto. It can't be seen that far away, but astronomers know just about where it is all the time....

The librarian told me that one famous writer was born when Halley’s Comet came in 1834 and died when it came back in 1910. The writer said it should be that way for him. He said that he and the comet were “freaks of nature” born together, and that he would be disappointed if he did not go out with the comet. His name was Mark Twain.

Even though we’re not afraid of comets today, scientists say that some comets may have hit the earth. They know asteroids have. They think a comet or part of a comet, or an asteroid knocked over and singed hundreds of hundreds of square miles of trees in Siberia in 1908, just two years before Halley's came. It killed a herd of 1500 reindeer, and people hundreds of miles away heard the blast. Now scientists say something like that may have happened to the dinosaurs to cause them to become extinct.

When I visit Grannie tomorrow, she's going to be surprised at all I know about comets now. I sure am glad I asked! I hope when I’m Grannie’s age, my great-grandchildren will tell me all the new things they find out about comet. And I’ll be able to tell them what Halley looked like through a telescope 76 years ago. In 2061 when I’m 84, I sure do hope they ask!