śrī ketu ṣoḍaśanāma stotram

Sixteen names of Ketu spoken by Skanda, and they describe a portent rather than a planet. He is the son of death and the crested one; he bears the shape of a fire-omen; he is many-formed and smoke-hued, and then white and black and yellow one after another, as if the colour could not be settled. He is made of shadow. He is the banner and he is the tail. He is forever the maker of the world's dissolution. The last pair is the sharpest: he is the one whose form is unseen, and if he is seen, he is the terror of living things — which is a description of a comet and of what its appearance was taken to mean. Its closing verse names the gift that goes with the recitation, a cat's-eye stone given to a household astrologer, and sets the term at a fortnight or half of one.