It was 4 a.m. on Nov. 25 at the top of Hawaii's dormant Maunakea volcano. The process to view the comet took less time than expected.
On the main screen, the subject at hand, interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS was a small, fuzzy blob drifting through a crowded field of stars. On another, its light had been stretched into a barcode of rainbow lines, some brighter than others, each corresponding to a different gas boiling off the object's nucleus.
