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Pastimes : Astronomy - any star lovers out there? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (176)	10/26/2007 3:02:22 AM
From: EL KABONG!!!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 180

Under the dark skies of country living, you should have a beautiful view of Comet Holmes, now a naked eye comet in the constellation Perseus. Perseus rises in the northeast shortly after nightfall, and is visible all night/morning until dawn. I observed the comet tonight, in a telescope and via binoculars. In binoculars, it appears as a "fat" star, somewhat fuzzy around the circumference and very bright in the middle. In a telescope (lower power is better, as high power tends to make the available light too diffuse, rendering the observation disappointing), the comet appears as a round ball of diffuse light around the circumference (sort of like looking at light from within a soap bubble) and a very bright light in the center. The tail is not obvious at first, but longer viewing time (the human eye adjusts to what is being viewed) reveals that the bright light in the center of the comet actually has a tail-like shape, leading me to believe that the comet is actually heading in the general direction of Earth, and so the tail is seen at only a very slight angle from an otherwise head on view. The comet is easily distinguishable from stars as it is quite large in the eyepiece (not a point of light, but large and round, easily as big as Jupiter appears in a telescope). The comet has an apparent magnitude of 2.x, easily found in the night sky. Draw an imaginary line from the very bright star Capella (the brightest star in the northeast sky) up to the star Algol, a somewhat dimmer star in Perseus, but still quite bright. The comet lies almost but not quite on that direct line (at least for tonight). Prior to Wednesday evening, Comet Holmes was a magnitude 18 (or thereabouts). Sometime between Tuesday at dawn and Wednesday after dusk, the comet brightened from MAG 18 to MAG 2.x, which is on the order of millions of times brighter. The brightening would have occurred when the night skies were over Asia, Europe and the Atlantic Ocean. As of right now, no one knows why this immense brightening happened. The comet is actually located between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, so astronomically speaking, it's really quite close to us now, and is inbound towards the sun. This periodic comet was last seen in the 1800's and strangely enough, a similar brightening phenomenon was observed then by its discoverer (Holmes). However, this brightening exceeds that of the 1800's by a huge margin. EK!!!