On a windy, bitterly cold night in March, some 2,000 people crowded the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., to check out the comet Hale-Bopp from a telescope. Only after hours of standing in lines did some of us learn that the show was equally good through binoculars. Still, the mutual interest created something of a party atmosphere; we enjoyed one another while we waited.

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