Comet ISON is predicted to be 15x the brightness of a Full Moon, visible during daylight. It is the comet of the Millenium and perhaps the greatest comet of all times. It’s near parabolic orbit leads astronomers to believe this is its 1st approach to the Sun. ISON is an Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Old English derivation of “Joseph” meaning “Adding or Increasing.

Comet ISON is 3 miles wide with a tail of gas and dust almost 200 thousand miles long. Its orbit is estimated at 10 thousand years and said to be traveling 48,000 miles per hour; it is believed to be the first time it has entered our solar system, but who could really know these things? These unprecedented statistics is why 2013 has been called The Year of the Comet and ISON is being called the Comet of the Century. ISON is a Sun-Grazer, meaning its orbit swings it around the sun and back out again.

It enters our solar system from the constellation of Orion between Taurus and Gemini and from the direction of the star Sirius, associated with the Egyptian deity Isis.  Walter Cruttenden at the BinaryResearchCenter, and author of Lost Star, does a wonderful job of showing that our sun and Sirius are in an orbit around each other.

From September into October, ISON will be sweeping across the constellation of Leo. It is calculated to pass by Mars on October 1st. It then passes through Virgo in November where it becomes visible to the naked eye for the first time on the first day of Hanukkah, November 28th.

ISON swings around the sun on November 28th, Thanksgiving Day. It is an ancient holiday of harvest.  On its way back out, ISON comes closest to the Earth on December 26th, the day after Christmas, as things currently stand.

The comet ISON could be very dangerous. It has to pass through our asteroid belt which could disturb things there. It could break apart and pose even more of a threat, or we could get hit by debris as we pass through the tail on its way out of our solar system. We certainly will be plummeted with its dust.  It could trigger solar flares.  It could move from its projected path for any unseen reason. It is very unpredictable.

I decided to look up the meaning of the names of the two Russians who discovered ISON: Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok.

The name of the first astronomer, Vitali, means life. His last name, Nevski, is an offshoot of Neva, which is a river in Russia and means “sea” or “water”. Therefore, the name of the first guy breaks down into “Vital or Living Waters”. In Latin, the meaning of Neva is radiance or brightness. In this case his name would mean “alive with radiant brightness”. Scientists are interested in ISON due to a study in how icy comets seed life throughout the universe. Without water there is no life.

The name of the second astronomer is where it gets ominous. The name Artyom originates from ARTEMISIOS and means WORMWOOD (a bitter herb). The name of one of the Russian discoverers of this 3 to 4 mile wide comet with a 200,000 mile tail translates to WORMWOOD.

Always having had an interest in astrotheology, I wrote a book after six months of study on this subject, which is on my writer’s home page.