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Comet McNaught Over CataloniaCredit & Copyright: Juan Casado (skylook.net) Explanation: This past weekend Comet McNaught peaked at a brightness that surpassed even Venus. Fascinated sky enthusiasts in the Earth's northern hemisphere were treated to an instantly visible comet head and a faint elongated tail near sunrise and sunset. Recent brightness estimates had Comet McNaught brighter than magnitude -5 (minus five) over this past weekend, making it the brightest comet since Comet Ikeya-Seki in 1965, which was recorded at -7 (minus seven). The Great Comet of 2007 reached its brightest as it rounded the Sun well inside the orbit of Mercury....

Comet McNaught has just made its appearance in the SOHO (SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory) "LASCO-3" field (at about the 11:00 position) -- and it is very bright!! The real-time image is viewable at http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATEST/current_c3small.mpg. In the next couple of days, the 48-hr MPEGs of the SOHO LASCO-3 field at http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATEST/current_c3small.mpg should be well worth watching. ~~~~~~ (The above URL is for the small (256 X 256) MPEG. The larger (512 X 512) MPEG at http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATEST/current_c3.mpg appears to have a problem at present.)

"If you live in the Northern hemisphere, this evening is your best remaining opportunity to catch Comet McNaught in its full glory. The comet is sinking rapidly from one evening to the next, but it's also getting brighter.."

Comet McNaught: Brightest Comet in 30 Years On Display Tonight. The brightest comet in thirty years may be able to be seen by the naked eye tonight. Comet McNaught is plunging toward the sun, and the heat is causing it to brighten dramatically. A few days ago, it was barely visible in evening twilight, but now it pops into view while the sky is still glowing blue. Only Venus is brighter.BBS News is reporting that Comet McNaught has continued to brighten as it approaches the sun and it is now the brightest comet in 30 years.. COMETS: Astrology Weekly...

Comet McNaught (2006 P1) has brightened rapidly in the last few days. It's now bright, beautiful, and easy to see at dawn and dusk — as long as you're fairly far north, know exactly where to look, and have an unobstructed horizon and perfect conditions. For most observers in the United States, the comet is quite close to the horizon at twilight, where even the slightest wisp of cloud can hide it. The geometry is more favorable for observers in northern Europe and Canada, who report Comet McNaught as an easy naked-eye object. In the Southern Hemisphere the comet is...

Heavenly bodies stir up routine catastrophes March 18 2003 at 01:30PM By Graeme Addison Legend has it that when two people get together and er... bond, the Earth will move – at least in a metaphorical sense. Likewise, it takes two heavenly bodies, an impactor and a target, to come together with Earth-shattering force to form a crater. There’s nothing dreamlike about this: it happens, frequently, throughout the solar system. Impact catastrophes are routine. Just over two-billion years ago, a chunk of asteroid at least the size of Table Mountain struck the landmass that is now South Africa. It hurtled...

SAN FRANCISCO - Detailed observations from the first comet samples returned to Earth are debunking some of science's long-held beliefs on how the icy, celestial bodies form. Scientists expected the minute grains retrieved from a comet Wild 2 to be made up mostly of interstellar dust — tiny particles that flow through the solar system thought to be from ancient stars that exploded and died. Instead, they found an unusual mix of primordial material as if the solar system had turned itself inside out. Hot particles from the inner solar system migrated out to the cold, outer fringes beyond Pluto...

A comet made a death plunge into the Sun on Friday, disintegrating as its icy chemicals vaporized on the way in. An animation showing the comet's plunge was made with images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).

What had been a modest comet seen only with binoculars or telescopes flared up this week to become visible to the naked eye [images]. Comet Swan, as it is called, is in the western sky after sunset from the Northern Hemisphere. It remains faint, likely not easy to find under bright city lights but pretty simple to spot from the countryside. It is a "fairly easy naked-eye comet," said Pete Lawrence, who photographed the comet from the UK. "The tail is now showing some interesting features too." UPDATE: Late Thursday, however, Lawrence reported that the comet already may be getting...

Two of the most common materials found in Tempel 1 are an iron-silicon mineral called ferrosilite and a glassy form of a magnesium-iron mineral called olivine, which make up 33% and 17% of the comet, respectively, according to observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope. However, these minerals are entirely absent from the Wild 2 samples analysed so far... It is not clear how to explain this difference, says Stardust mission leader Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington in Seattle, US. But he says one possibility is that the material on Tempel 1 was chemically modified by ancient collisions --...

177 P/Barnard (2006 M3) 1. 177 P/Barnard (2006 M3),. is a returning semi-long period (117 year orbit) comet that was originally discovered on June 24th ,1889 by E.E. Barnard with a six-inch refractor from the Lick Observatory in California at mag. 9.5. For all these years it was lost to the world until the LINEAR robotic imager “recovered” it at 17th magnitude as an apparent asteroidal object. This occurred on June 23, almost exactly 117 years later. For a while it carried the designation P/2006 M3 (Barnhard), but it has since been changed to 177P/ Barnard. In addition, in...

Though NASA officials have said nothing on the subject, astronomy today is on the edge of a critical shift in perception—a revolution that could redefine our view of the heavens. Above, the “Great Comet” of 1996, Hyakutake. The stunning discovery of X-ray emissions from the visitor was a milestone in comet science, as was the discovery that the comet's coherent and filamentary ion tail spanned more than 350 million miles. - Credit: NASA Proponents of the “Electric Universe” say that a revolution in the sciences is inescapable, and they believe the failure of modern comet theory could be the tipping...

In 1996 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele spotted an unusual yellow-green gem in the middle of one of Tutankhamun's necklaces. The jewel was tested and found to be glass, but intriguingly it is older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation. Working with Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat, they traced its origins to unexplained chunks of glass found scattered in the sand in a remote region of the Sahara Desert. But the glass is itself a scientific enigma. How did it get to be there and who or what made it? Thursday's BBC Horizon programme reports an...

Terrestrial Evidence of a Nuclear Catastrophe in Paleoindian Times by Richard B. Firestone & William Topping The Paleoindian occupation of North America, theoretically the point of entry of the first people to the Americas, is traditionally assumed to have occurred within a short time span beginning at about 12,000 yr B.P. This is inconsistent with much older South American dates of around 32,000 yr B.P.1 and the similarity of the Paleoindian toolkit to Mousterian traditions that disappeared about 30,000 years ago.2. A pattern of unusually young radiocarbon dates in the Northeast has been noted by Bonnichsen and Will.3,4 Our research...

New Scientist for Dec 14, 2002, had a cover story for Planet X: The Hunt for Planet X by Heather Couperand Nigel HenbestJust over a year after the New Horizons' launch, it will... pick up enough velocity to reach Pluto, possibly as early as July 2015... In their new research, Melita and Brunini have explored three possible reasons for the Kuiper Cliff... The third possibility is that the region beyond was brushed clear by the gravity of Planet X... the KBO orbits they have investigated so far fit in best with the influence of a Planet X.

A ball of gas more massive than a billion suns is hurtling like an enormous comet through the interior of a distant galaxy cluster. The massive structure is held together by mysterious dark matter, astronomers said today, but it is steadily breaking apart and becoming fuel for new stars. "This is likely a massive building block being delivered to one of the largest assembly of galaxies we know," said study team member Alexis Finoguenov of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The finding is detailed in the June 6 issue of Astrophysical Journal. Great ball of fire The gas blob...

Does a giant crater lie beneath the Antarctic ice? Signs of an ancient impact could help to explain a mass extinction. Mark Peplow A dense bit of rock in the Antarctic (orange circle) seems to be circled by a crater. © Ohio State University Evidence of a cataclysmic meteorite impact has been unearthed in Antarctica, according to researchers who say the collision could possibly explain the greatest mass extinction ever seen on our planet. But scientists contacted by news@nature.com say they are sceptical, as no signs of such an enormous impact have been found in other, well-studied areas of Antarctica....

Comet break-up puts on sky show The comet is breaking into fragments. (Image: European Southern Observatory) A comet is delighting astronomers with a marvellous night-time display as it makes a near pass of the Earth. The ball of ice, rock and dust has broken up into more than 60 pieces; two of the larger fragments are visible through binoculars or small telescopes. At its closest approach this weekend, the comet will be some 10 million km (six million miles) from the Earth. Continued disintegration means this may be the last swing around the Sun for Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3. Good chance...

The Mars rover Opportunity's examination of Martian rocks last week provided the first convincing evidence that our neighbour world was once "awash" in water, as one NASA scientist described it. But where did the water come from? And why does Mars have no liquid water now, while Earth apparently has been covered with the stuff for 4 billion years? Scientists are just beginning to piece the story together, and it goes right back to the beginning. Mars, like Earth, was formed from dusty and rocky debris left over after the sun was born 4.57 billion years ago. Initially, there were...

Big Breakup: That's the way the comet crumbles Ron Cowen Scores of telescopes are watching a comet fall apart, and the main show may be only beginning. The comet has already fragmented into at least 59 pieces and may continue to break up as it reaches its position closest to the sun on June 6. In mid-May, the chunks will venture within 11.7 million kilometers of Earth—the closest any comet has come to our planet in 20 years—and the largest fragments should be visible with binoculars. Called Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, this body passes near the sun every 5.4 years and...

Comet break-up pictured by Hubble The image shows the break-up of one fragment into smaller pieces The break-up of a comet has been shown in extraordinary detail by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. The images reveal the comet has crumbled into over three dozen fragments; many more than had been shown from ground-based observations. Astronomers say the Hubble images will provide an unprecedented opportunity to study a comet's demise. The disintegrating comet will pass Earth on 6 May at a distance of 11.7 million km (7.3 million miles). Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, discovered in 1930 by German astronomers, orbits the Sun...

Chunks of a comet currently splitting into pieces in the night sky will not strike the Earth next month, nor will it spawn killer tsunamis and mass extinctions, NASA officials said Thursday. The announcement, NASA hopes, will squash rumors that a fragment of the crumbling Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 (SW 3) will slam into Earth just before Memorial Day. "There are some Internet stories going around that there's going to be an impact on May 25," NASA spokesperson Grey Hautaluoma, told SPACE.com. "We just want to get the facts out." Astronomers have been observing 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, a comet that circles the...

Self-destructing comet to flash close by 10:30 24 April 2006 NewScientist.com news service Kimm Groshong Astronomers will soon be treated to a close-up celestial show, with a fragmenting comet streaming across the sky in more than 30 chunks. Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 has been breaking up since 1995, but between 12 and 14 May will come closer to the Earth than any comet since 1983. Fortunately no threat is posed to Earth since, even at its closest, the nearest of the pieces will be twenty times more distant than the Moon. But astronomers around the world will take advantage of the...

Eric Julien, a former French military air traffic controller and senior airport manager, has completed a study of the comet 73P Schwassmann- Wachmann and declared that a fragment is highly likely to impact the Earth on or around May 25, 2006. Comet Schwassman-Wachmann follows a five-year orbit that crosses the solar system's ecliptic plane. It has followed its five year orbit intact for centuries; but, in 1995, mysteriously fragmented. According to Julien, this is the same year that a crop circle appeared showing the inner solar system with the Earth missing from its orbit. He argues the "Missing Earth" crop...

TALE OF ARTHUR POINTS TO COMET CATASTROPHE From The Times, 9 September 2000 http://www.the-times.co.uk BY NICK NUTTALL Arthur: myth links him to fire from the sky THE story of the death of King Arthur and its references to a wasteland may have been inspired by the apocalyptic effects of a giant comet bombarding the Earth in AD540, leading to the Dark Ages, a British scientist said yesterday. The impacts filled the atmosphere with dust and debris; a long winter began. Crops failed, and there was famine, Dr Mike Baillie of Queen's University, Belfast, told the British Association for the Advancement...

Hybrid comet-asteroid in mysterious break-up 09:30 11 April 2006 NewScientist.com news service Jeff HechtThe large, diffuse breakaway object is centred at the 2 o'clock position relative to the nucleus. The image is a negative, with the darkest areas representing the brightest objects. Something substantial has broken off an icy 50-kilometre object beyond the orbit of Saturn, leaving puzzled astronomers trying to figure out why. Comets have been seen breaking up before, but only after heating when passing close to the Sun or a gravitational disturbance following a close encounter with a planet. However, at 1.9 billion kilometres, this object is...

Clandestine comets found in main asteroid belt 19:00 23 March 2006 NewScientist.com news service Kimm Groshong You do not have to look to the outer edges of the solar system, or even out beyond Neptune to observe a reservoir of comets. A bevy of the ice-containing bodies lies disguised as main-belt asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, claim astronomers from the University of Hawaii, US. David Jewitt and Henry Hsieh have dubbed the new population "main belt comets". They describe three objects with near circular, flat orbits in the asteroid belt that stream volatile materials, producing an observable tail for weeks...

IRC+10216, also known as CW Leonis, was once a well-behaved main-sequence star as our own Sun is now... When astronomers turned the satellite toward IRC+10216 they discovered a substantial cloud of water vapor about 100 AU across. ("AU" --short for Astronomical Unit-- is a unit of length used by astronomers. One AU equals the mean distance between Earth and the Sun.) "There must be about four Earth-masses of frozen water around IRC+10216 to produce the vapor cloud we see," says Melnick. The water vapor probably does not come from the vaporization of oceans on an Earth-like planet, because there wouldn't...

Comet dust sample contains surprises LEAGUE CITY, Texas, March 13 (UPI) -- Scientists analyzing recent samples of comet dust say they have discovered minerals that formed near the sun or other stars. That means materials from the innermost part of the solar system could have traveled to the outer reaches, where comets formed. "The interesting thing is we are finding these high-temperature minerals in materials from the coldest place in the solar system," said Donald Brownlee, a University of Washington astronomer and the lead scientist for NASA's Stardust mission. Among the finds in material brought back by Stardust is olivine,...

Amelia Gentleman and Robin McKie Sunday March 5, 2006 The Observer There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University's microbiology laboratory. The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting. Yet, if one group of scientists is correct, the phial contains the first samples of extraterrestrial life isolated by researchers. Inside the bottle are samples left over from one of the strangest incidents in recent meteorological history. On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the next two months. All along the coast it...

During the next couple of weeks skywatchers will be turning their attention to a newly discovered comet that has just swept past the Sun and will soon cruise past Earth on its way back out toward the depths of the outer solar system. Astronomers, who attempt to forecast the future characteristics and behavior of these cosmic vagabonds, have found this new object to be a better-than-average performer. The comet is now visible with a simple pair of binoculars, and it's also dimly visible to the naked eye if you know precisely where to look ...

SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) - A honeycomb cluster of cells on NASA's Stardust spacecraft captured thousands of samples of interstellar and comet dust that scientists said Thursday could give them the first definitive evidence about how the solar system formed. "Its cargo was an ancient, cosmic treasure from the very edge of the solar system - a treasure that formed when the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago," said Donald Brownlee, a University of Washington scientist who worked on the Stardust mission managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Some of the samples collected during the seven-year,...

DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah - A space capsule ferrying the first comet dust samples to Earth parachuted onto a remote stretch of desert before dawn Sunday, drawing cheers from elated scientists. The touchdown capped a seven-year journey by NASA's Stardust spacecraft, which zipped past a comet in 2004 to capture minute dust particles and store them in the capsule. "It's an absolutely fantastic end to the mission," said Carlton Allen, a scientist with NASA's Johnson Space Center. A helicopter recovery team located the capsule Sunday and was transferring it to a clean room at the nearby Michael Army Air Field....

TOOELE, Utah - The last time NASA scientists hunkered down at a Utah Army base, they stared wide-eyed as a space probe carrying solar wind atoms crashed into the salt flats and split open like a giant clamshell. Flash forward two years. Nerves are on edge as scientists anxiously await the return of another space probe — this one named Stardust and bearing the first comet samples ever carried to Earth. It is scheduled to make a pre-dawn landing at the Army's remote Dugway Proving Ground on Sunday. Memories of the ill-fated 2004 Genesis landing, in which the space probe's...

BERKELEY -- Astronomy buffs who jumped at the chance to use their home computers in the SETI@home search for intelligent life in the universe will soon be able to join an Internet-based search for dust grains originating from stars millions of light years away. In a new project called Stardust@home, University of California, Berkeley, researchers will invite Internet users to help them search for a few dozen submicroscopic grains of interstellar dust captured by NASA's Stardust spacecraft and due to return to Earth in January 2006. Though Stardust's main mission was to capture dust from the tail of comet Wild...

LOS ANGELES - When a NASA capsule hauling comet and interstellar dust plummets through the Earth's atmosphere this weekend, residents in large sweeps of the West will witness a cosmic spectacle. During the Stardust capsule's blazing re-entry at 1:57 a.m. PST Sunday, it will travel at 29,000 mph, making it the fastest man-made object to return to Earth. The 100-pound cargo will arc over Northern California toward Utah's Dugway Proving Ground, a remote Army base southwest of Salt Lake City. Residents in parts of Northern California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada and Utah should see the Stardust capsule as it streaks...

It's a match made in heaven: Jessica Sunshine and comet Tempel 1. The geologist, a Tenafly native with an asteroid named after her, never expected to meet this kind of celestial body. But talent and dumb luck landed her on NASA's Deep Impact mission that might reveal the building blocks of the universe. The $333 million project involves an impactor, fired from a mother ship, hurtling at 23,000 mph and crashing smack dab into the comet a little before 2 a.m. on Monday, creating a massive crater up to 14 stories deep. Through a telescope, the cosmic union won't look...

In Egyptian myth, Apophis was the ancient spirit of evil and destruction, a demon that was determined to plunge the world into eternal darkness. A fitting name, astronomers reasoned, for a menace now hurtling towards Earth from outerspace. Scientists are monitoring the progress of a 390-metre wide asteroid discovered last year that is potentially on a collision course with the planet, and are imploring governments to decide on a strategy for dealing with it.

Moses' Comet Moses’ Comet, by Mike Baillie Discovering Archeology, July/August 1999 Moses called down a host of calamities upon Egypt until the pharaoh finally freed the Israelites. Perhaps he had the help of a comet impact coupled with a volcano. A volcano destroyed the island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea (between today's Greece and Turkey) around the middle of the second millennium B.C. Researchers Val LaMarche and Kathy Hirschboeck suggest the volcano might be associated with tree-ring evidence for several years of intense cold beginning in 1627 B.C. Could that form the basis for strange meteorological phenomena recorded in...

"Before SOHO was launched, 16 sungrazing comets had been discovered by space observatories. Based on that experience, who could have predicted that SOHO would discover more than sixty times that number, and in only nine years? This is truly a remarkable achievement!" said Dr. Chris St. Cyr, Senior Project Scientist for NASA's Living With a Star program at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Data from Deep Impact's instruments indicate an immense cloud of fine powdery material was released when the probe slammed into the nucleus of comet Tempel 1 at 6.3 miles per second. The cloud indicated the comet is covered in the powdery stuff. The Deep Impact science team continues to wade through gigabytes of data collected during the July 4 encounter with the 3-mile-wide by 7-mile-long comet. "The major surprise was the opacity of the plume the impactor created and the light it gave off," said Deep Impact Principal Investigator Dr. Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, College Park. "That...

THUNDERBOLTS PICTURE OF THE DAYExploring the electric universe From ancient mythology to cosmic plasma discharge   homethe book quotes picture of the day picture archive subject index the film(video clips) products Contact usElectric Universe: Holoscience Electric Cosmos The Universe Dragon Science Plasma Cosmology Society for Interdisciplinary Studies     Jul 05, 2005Deep Impact?First ImpressionsThe Deep Impact was an amazing show, and there will be much more information to come.In advance of the event we set forth our expectations as explicitly as possible. Therefore, we urge readers of this page to refer to our previous Picture of the Day.We also...

The arrogantly named "Rods from God" weapons from space weapons of mass destruction "WMD" program (see the second article below) is well underway and has received a substantial boost from the successful trial attack on comet Tempel-1. Capping a series of other recent planetary death weapons tests such as the failed space mirror test conducted by the Planetary Society, the NASA probe "Deep Impact" provided military observers with significant data and analysis concerning the proper design for kinetic energy weapons configured to slam into an Earth ground target, releasing an explosion similar to an atomic weapon but without the radiation....

MOSCOW (AP) - NASA's mission that sent a space probe smashing into a comet raised more than cosmic dust - it also brought a lawsuit from a Russian astrologer. Marina Bai has sued the U.S. space agency, claiming the Deep Impact probe that punched a crater into the comet Tempel 1 late Sunday "ruins the natural balance of forces in the universe," the newspaper Izvestia reported Tuesday. A Moscow court has postponed hearings on the case until late July, the paper said. The probe's comet crash sent up a cloud of debris that scientists hope to examine to learn how...

Russian Astrologer Sues NASA Over Comet MOSCOW (AP) -- NASA's mission that sent a space probe smashing into a comet raised more than cosmic dust - it also brought a lawsuit from a Russian astrologer. Marina Bai has sued the U.S. space agency, claiming the Deep Impact probe that punched a crater into the comet Tempel 1 late Sunday "ruins the natural balance of forces in the universe," the newspaper Izvestia reported Tuesday. A Moscow court has postponed hearings on the case until late July, the paper said. The probe's comet crash sent up a cloud of debris that scientists...

NASA's film of the impact are incredible. One from the impactor and one from the fly-by craft. Look here: http://www.nasa.gov/mov/121530main_its_approach_x4.mov http://www.nasa.gov/mov/121527main_MRI_impact.mov Watch the one from the impactor. Early in the film, the camera seems to aquire a target, as it was probably supposed to do by design. Keep watching frame by frame. You will see two large craters come into clear view at the center section of the frame. As it gets closer, it seems to target a spot just below the upper crater. Just south south west of the craters looks like a frozen lake. It is very much...

A Russian astrologist who says NASA has altered her horoscope by crashing a spacecraft into a comet is suing the U.S. space agency for damages of $300 million, local media has reported. NASA deliberately crashed its probe, named Deep Impact, into the Tempel 1 comet to unleash a spray of material formed billions of years ago which scientists hope will shed new light on the composition of the solar system. "It is obvious that elements of the comet's orbit, and correspondingly the ephemeris, will change after the explosion, which interferes with my astrology work and distorts my horoscope," Izvestia daily...

PASADENA, Calif. - It sounded like science fiction — NASA scientists used a space probe to chase down a speeding comet 83 million miles away and slammed it into the frozen ball of dirty ice and debris in a mission to learn how the solar system was formed. The unmanned probe of the Deep Impact mission collided with Tempel 1, a pickle-shaped comet half the size of Manhattan, late Sunday as thousands of people across the country fixed their eyes to the southwestern sky for a glimpse. The impact at 10:52 p.m. PDT was cause for celebration not only to...

PASADENA, Calif. - A space probe hit its comet target late Sunday in a NASA-directed, Hollywood-style mission that scientists hope will reveal clues to how the solar system formed. It was the first time a spacecraft had ever touched the surface of a comet, igniting brief Independence Day weekend fireworks in space. The successful strike 83 million miles away from Earth occurred at 10:52 p.m. PDT, according to mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Scientists on the mission — called Deep Impact, like the movie — erupted in applause and exchanged hugs. "A lot of people said...

PASADENA, Calif. — A NASA space probe was bearing down on its comet target Sunday in a suicide mission scientists hoped would provide new insight into the origins of the solar system.