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Greetings Cometeers:
This is to inform you that the next issue of Comet Comments, the one you will read in the May Prime Focus edition, will be my last one. I am telling you this now so that all of you, especially the newsletter editor, will have time to assemble your own way of reporting comet news and positions after CC is gone.
There are several reasons why I'm retiring after 21 years of writing a monthly column. About a year ago, I began to show symptoms of disorder which appears to be inherited; my brother has it, too. It is not fatal and not contagious. Medication sometimes helps; but the lack of concentration, poor coordination and fatigue now make it difficult to produce an accurate, interesting comet article in a timely manner.
There's other reasons, too. I used to do the whole thing in three nights: research, write and distribute. Then the internet became involved in this. I can reach more people, but the Web page had difficulties and finally crashed (mine is now frozen on the web, I cannot change or delete it). "Fatal delivery" messages and re-sends, and writing/formatting two versions each month (electronic and paper) all add to the time the column now takes. Moreover, with the Internet, amateurs now have easy access to nearly all the information I publish. Finally, in the old days when amateurs found many of the comets, it was important to distribute the ephemerides information early because the comets were already bright enough to be seen in our telescopes. Now, when LNEAR finds a faint comet, it is months before the comet will be bright enough for the readers to see it.
For the record, I got nearly all my news and orbital
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