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.

Another evening, after disembarking from a commuter bus, I startled upon glimpsing the comet-which caused a woman walking past to stop, look up, and begin chatting with me about its rare visit as we trudged along to our homes. And a third night, when my family and I took a quick trip to witness the celestial object in the solitary darkness of the nearby countryside, another family seemed to materialize out of nowhere. With our kids sleeping in the cars, we parents stood in a field surrounded by spring peepers and just looked up, sharing our sense of awe. Hale-Bopp, shining so strongly after a 4,200-year hiatus, provided a common ground, so to speak, for people to breach their usual boundaries.

Most often Technology Review focuses on the implications of technology, the application of science, an emphasis with which I am delighted. No matter whether science rings one's chimes or not, I tell people unfamiliar with the publication that our magazine is an important read because of the omnipresent role of technology in our lives. And unless we consider its ramifications we have no hope of controlling them. I am a practical person, happy to be grounded in the topics Technology Review delves into repeatedly. Still, once in a while a natural event such as Hale-Bopp stirs up in me-and obviously in huge numbers of others as well-a very different set of emotions.

At Technology Review we refer to wonderful stories about pure science as "brighteners," and we enjoy presenting them. Extending the term's use a bit, I'd like to suggest that all of us remember the importance of paying homage to brighteners of nature: the booming thunderstorm, the sparkling meteor shower, the unexpectedly heavy snowfall, even the leafing out of a tree in spring or the curling of a woolly-bear caterpillar on a path.