posted
Comet McNaught is near the sun in the sky. The best chance to see it from the northern hemisphere was last week. I looked for 3 nights and didn't see it. Apparently people in high latitudes had a better chance. Now it's visible to people in the southern hemisphere. This gif is amazing, though. It's a movie made from images from the SOHO telescope. The sun is at the center of the picture, but its light is blocked. The smaller dot moving from right to left that seems to almost intersect with the comet is the planet Mercury. Click on the link and look now! I'm not sure how much longer this gif will show the comet.
(The white horizontal lines in the comet and in Mercury are artifacts of the camera. Their brightness is saturating the ccds there. You may have seen your digital camera do this at times, as well. The SOHO observatory is a spacecraft that was launched in 1995 to study the sun. This camera ordinarily observes the suns corona.)
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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posted
Awesome! I wish I had seen it. But be sure to click on the link and look at that gif, too! It's really amazing! Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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I can't see it because the combination of high altitude water vapor and smog glares out too large an area around the Sun even when the Sun itself is blocked out by an obstruction.
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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posted
The astronomer here said it would next be visible on Thursday. Until then, I guess it's below the horizon for us. We're at latititude 40 degrees (nearly), here in Kansas. Just FYI.
Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote: If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, January 12th is your last good opportunity to catch Comet McNaught in the evening twilight — though January 13th isn't completely out of the question. After that, Comet McNaught will become a target for observers in the Southern Hemisphere, as shown below. ... Up to now, people at far northerly latitudes have had the best views of Comet McNaught, but on January 12th the observing geometry is pretty much the same throughout the North Temperate Zone. On the 13th people at low latitudes in both hemispheres will be best placed to see the comet, and after that, people in the Southern Hemisphere will be favored.
Tstorm, are you in the southern hemisphere? If so you've got a good chance to see it! (If you mean Kansas in the United States, you missed it already.)
Be sure to check out the photo gallery for images caught by different people around the planet. Some of them are dreamy! I wish I had seen it myself!
posted
I think he's mistaken, though. S&T always has definitive observing info for the last 30 years so I trust'em. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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I never got to see the comet. Between work and poor horizon conditions, oh well.
I asked the astronomy teacher and he indicated last Thursday, Jan. 18 was the last gasp for us. He never saw the comet, either, despite looking harder than I did.
My Dad thinks he saw it last Wednesday morning (Jan. 17, on his drive to work. He described it as "a piece of contrail hanging near the horizon, near where the sun was going to come up." That sounds like what the photos look like. Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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