Here’s to the Year of the Comets

YOU'LL NEED binoculars, a clear night and a view of the western skyline shortly after sunset as the first stars blink awake. Even then it's hard to spot the newest heavenly object in our sky, the Pan-starrs comet. The comet itself could be mistaken for a regular tiny star except that it has a dim tail of light standing straight up like an exclamation mark!

As it travels away from the Earth and the sun during March into April it will rise higher in the sky tracking parallel with the horizon between Pisces and Andromeda: constellations that anyone with a smart phone can find using an app that maps the heavens simply by aiming your phone at the sky.

Don't worry if you can't see the somewhat retiring Pan-Starrs comet. Unlike the poet Seamus Heaney who fretted in ‘ Exposure' that he had missed “the once-in-a-lifetime portent, the comet's pulsing rose”, this comet – named after an automated astronomical array in Hawaii that hunts for passing celestial objects, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System – Pan-Starrs is the first of two bright comets visible from Earth this year.

In November through to December comet Ison is due to pass within 800,000 miles of the Earth – an incredibly close shave in astronomical terms that should make it one of the brightest comets seen. Take heed though that the same was promised of Kohoutek's comet in 1973, which turned out to be a damp squib, yet by the same token Hale-Bopp in 1997 was spectacular.

Forecasting the brightness of comets is not an exact science, but we do know that the Pan-Starrs comet is a composite lump of minerals, ice and organic compounds about 20-30 km in diameter, which has been bumped free from the Oort debris cloud that circles the very outer rim of our solar system.

As it nears our sun the heat causes the comet's dust and gasses to flare into a bright tail like a kite blown by the solar wind and radiation.

In the past, however, comets were thought to be heavenly omens sent to mark great social upheavals. These “long-haired stars with flames” were said to predict a change in sovereignty, the arrival of plague and the outbreak of war.

We know from seeing it depicted in the Bayeux tapestry that Halley's comet, which comes around every 76 years, was seen at the time of the Norman conquests in 1066; and it was back again in the skies over Britain to coincided with the death of Kind Edward the VII in 1910.

Yet as Shakespeare made clear in Julius Caesar, comets are so rare they are considered to be of concern only to the great and powerful.

“The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes”. As for rest of us, Shakespeare adds, “When beggars die there are no comets seen.”

So what are we to make of the presence of not one but two notable comets in our skies this year?

I can't help thinking that with the PanStarrs comet arriving at the same time as the introduction of the property tax, and the Ison comet due around the time of Budget 2013, perhaps it is the Government who have the most cause to look towards the horizon and be nervous.