Could you pass Astronomy 101? Take the quiz!

16. When are comet tails the longest?

NASA Hubble telescope / Courtesy of NASA / Reuters
Comet ISON was photographed by the Hubble telescope on April 10, 2013 when the comet was 386 million miles from the Sun (slightly closer than Jupiter's orbit). Around the time the 'comet of the century' makes its closest approach to the Sun, on November 28, it may briefly become brighter than the full Moon, say NASA researchers.

When the comet is approaching the sun and all the ices are turning to water vapor and carbon dioxide

When the comet is leaving the sun, after more ices have burned off

When the comet is closest to the sun, going or coming

When the comet is "home" in the Oort cloud

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About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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