Try looking up for a change.

On more than one occasion, the BDS has looked straight down the barrel of a Bud Light bottle searching for answers; answers that can only be fully understood and appreciated while peering through smoke-colored glass. But this week is different. This week, the BDS encourages anyone searching for something, anything, beyond the bottle cap to look straight up instead. For if you look in the right place this week, you can almost see the finger of God drawing a line across his backyard.

It's called Comet Machholz. While you're busy wasting time on this two-bit joke of a blog, it's out there. Hurling through the darkness at speeds anywhere from 3 to 60 miles/second. Think about that. Up to 60 miles/second. Yeah, that's an actual photo of the thing courtesy of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory out in California.

And this Wednesday night, it'll be closer to your beer fridge than ever before.

Officially designated c/2004 Q2, it was discovered early last year and backyard astronomers have been watching Machholz for months. Now it's close enough to be seen without binoculars or telescopes. On January 5-6, it will be a short 32 million miles from our liquid-blue planet. It is not expected to produce the sort of spectacular display put on by comet Hale-Bopp in 1997 or the periodically stunning Halley's comet, but it's worth a look nonetheless.

So go outside. Get as far away from that corner street light as possible. Look up. See the three-star belt in Orion? Keep looking up. Up some more. A little more. There it is, just above Taurus the Bull (not the car, Thompson).

Comets are made of rocky material and icy mixtures of water (among other things). As the comet approaches the Sun, the surface is heated and eventually boils off. This is called sublimation. The gas and dust creates a head (called a coma) and many times that gas/dust mixture creates a tail. Sunlight is then reflected off the material, making some comets like Machholz visible from your beer coozy.