I got home a couple nights ago, hopped out of the car, and as always, looked up to see what the night sky had in store. And there, right in front of me, was a thing.

It was a pretty bright-ish thing with a well-defined point on one side and a wispy cone-shaped tail on the other side. Naturally, I assumed this was the comet that everyone (he said, with his tongue in his cheek) is talking about. I went inside, got The Boy and The Wife out of the house into the cold dark and pointed out the thing, and we all made appropriate noises of excited awe.

Then, later that evening, when we got home from an emergency chocolate run, we looked up again, and the thing was gone. Huh, we said, that’s weird. You wouldn’t think a comet would just go away over the course of an hour. Perhaps there is haze.

But then The Wife, ever curious and Google-rific, did a little digging. “Uh, honey,” she said after a bit, “that wasn’t the comet. That was a rocket.” Apparently the comet-like thing we saw was the booster jettisoning extra propellant after its spy satellite payload reached orbit.

You see the damnedest things when you look up.