A Comet Textbook From 300 B.C.

NASA has some nice historical comet stuff up on its Deep Impact Mission page (“Pope Calixtus III excommunicated Halley’s Comet as an instrument of the devil”), and I really like this: a 2300-year-old piece of Chinese silk upon which astronomers documented the difference between cometary forms (“long-tailed pheasant stars,” “broom stars,” etc) and linked them to specific types of disaster. It’s part of the Mawangdui Silk Texts, which were sealed in a tomb from 168 B.C. and not discovered until the ’70s: don’t you wish there was some way to do that with everything we’re fussing about now?