Opinion: Webb photos we reveled in are also a stark reminder | CNN

Editor’s Note: Nicole Hemmer is an associate research scholar at Columbia University with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project and the author of “ Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics” and the forthcoming “ Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.” She cohosts the history podcasts “ Past Present” and “ This Day in Esoteric Political History.” The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

Nearly every night during the spring of 1997, once dinner was done and the last dish put away, my dad and I would drag two lawn chairs out to our front yard to watch the Hale-Bopp comet. Visible even during the day, it would slowly brighten as dusk gave way to night.

Though Hale-Bopp, dubbed the Great Comet of 1997, would stay visible the rest of the year, its appearance grew more ominous in late March, when authorities discovered 39 bodies in a house in the suburbs of San Diego. All 39 belonged to Heaven’s Gate, a quasi-religious sect that believed a spaceship traveling in the comet’s tail was coming to help them ascend to a higher plane.

The realization that a powerful celestial event could cut two ways — that it could bring people together in shared awe and also…