Comet Encounter: ISON's Brush with the Sun

Gr 6–8—This overview offers an unusually detailed look at how teams of astronomers used optical telescopes, spectroscopic analyses, and crowdsourced databases to determine the orbit and composition of ISON, a comet that shot into the inner solar system from high above the plane of the ecliptic and, in November of 2013, grazed the sun. Lively mini-lectures on the origins of comets and the planets are interspersed with historical glimpses of comets as medieval harbingers of doom and their importance to the work of Sir Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley. The producers balance this cerebral content with quick visual cuts and ominous background music. Frequent renderings of the sun's seething surface and the spinning comet emitting great jets of gas crank up the melodramatic tone. As a further hook to less science-minded viewers, video clips of the 2013 meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia, and references to a California cult's mass suicide during the 1997 approach of Comet Hale-Bopp add positively lurid accents. An hour of astronomical thrills.—John Peters, Children's Literature Consultant, New York City