Checking the Almanac.

[Astroguyz]

The astronomer checked the ephemerides again. To be sure, the coming year was to be a dull one, with the usual cavalcade of shallow partial eclipses and wide conjunctions. Even the few comets that were set to bother with a passage through the inner solar system proved to be of little interest. “May we live in uninteresting times,” she remembered, as she flipped the chart with her tertiary tentacle and tried to recall why she had volunteered to be stationed on this tiny rocky world with its solitary pale moon, so far from the warming radiation core of the galaxy.

[ROU Killing Time]

I hear we are due a very bright "comet of the century" this year, actually.