Kepler Opera fiasco and comets

Several months ago I was doing a Google search on Kepler and stumbled across the news that Philip Glass had written a opera on Kepler that would be premiered in November this year. I was very excited about attending this and knew that tickets went on sale on September 8th. The opera had been commissioned by the city of Linz in Austria where Kepler spent the last years of his life and was being linked to both the 400th anniversary of the publication of Astronomia Nova, but also Linz's status as the EU city of culture for 2009. For some reason that now escapes me, I had therefore assumed that the production was being staged in Linz - perhaps the fact that it is being performed by a Linz orchestra?

The online booking system wasn't available first thing and I kept checking back every fifteen minutes. Then it was apparently working but I couldn't selct the ticket I wanted. But several hours later I finally managed to get through and book a ticket for the Friday night. Only then did I discover that the performance wasn't in Linz at all, but Brooklyn, New York! So my plan to use the trip to visit a number of Kepler-related sites has been completely ruined. I can't believe I was so stupid! I got one of the last remaining tickets - no wonder, Brooklyn is Glass's home territory. Right at this moment I am not sure whether I want to go - will have to think about it over the next few days

I have been working on some aspects of the comet of 1577 over the past few days as prep for some essay writing. I have found a website from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the USA that contains a database on comets including details of the 1577 comet as calculated from the available data. This allows the user to track the comet's path and can be linked to the data taken at the time. This seems to me to be an interesting add on to a standard history and one that Robert Westman was happy to use in a paper on this comet from the early 1970s.

A famous woodcut of the comet of 1577 by Jiri Daschitzsky showing the view over Prague on November 12th

Though I can remember the Apollo missions and the moon landing, my interest in astronomy actually dates from a few years later when Comet Kohoutek approached the earth in 1973/74. This was a deep space comet and was widely expected to put on a spectacular display. So each clear evening I would travel across to Kenilworth Castle on the opposite side of town and from where there was a long uninterrupted view to the horizon in the west. And using my dad's binoculars and star charts from the papers I would search for Kohoutek. It was a great disappointment. Once or twice I might have seen it but it was not the great naked eye event that I had been led to believe it could be. After all, the 1577 comet had a tail that spanned 22% of the sky. If I saw Kahoutek, it was a very faint smudge at best

But despite that, my love of astronomical observation was born in that period - perhaps as Venus and Jupiter were good viewing at that time. Over the next four or five years I filled many notebooks with my observations, mainly detailed star maps that I prepared in the back garden and on which I plotted planetary positions, especially Mars and Jupiter. I still have some of my original charts showing Mars in retrograde motion in either 1974 or 1975

Comet Kahoutek - such a disappointment

The path of Kahoutek, a deep space, non-repeating comet. My attempted observations were early 1974, when it should have visible in the early evening