Posted on 10/26/2006 9:00:01 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
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 dimmer. It is not clear what skywatchers should expect of this comet.
Find it
The comet, also catalogued as C/2006 M4, is about halfway up in the sky in the direction of the constellation Corona Borealis [Sky Map].
As with most comets, this one looks like a fuzzy star. It has an interesting green tint, however, indicating it has a lot of the poisonous gas cyanogen and diatomic carbon, astronomers say.
Sam Storch, a long-time sky watcher from Long Island, NY, said the comet appears "quite a bit deeper than any other green I have seen in any sky object, even planetary nebulae."
"Comet Swan is very easy to find," said Joe Rao, SPACE.com's Skywatching Columnist. "In good binoculars it appears as a bright, symmetrical and surprisingly green blob."
Legendary objects
Comets, the stuff of legend and myth, are frozen leftovers of the solar system's formation. Most orbit the Sun out beyond Neptune, but a few wander through the inner solar system now and then. As a comet gets closer to the Sun, solar radiation boils the frozen gases, along with dust, off the comet's surface. Sunlight reflects off this material, creating a head, or coma. Some comets never get very bright. Others brighten dramatically. Some even come unglued as they round the Sun.
Some comets, like Swan, also sport a tail or two. Such detail is best seen with binoculars or a small telescope.
Comet Swan was discovered last year. It makes its closest approach to Earth today. Eventually it will return to the distant reaches of the solar system. Rao said nobody knows how long the comet will grace the night sky.
Pete Lawrence captured this stunning photograph over the skies of Selsey, West Sussex, UK on October 24, 2006. He writes “Comet Swan appears to have brightened. In magnitude +5.5 skies with incoming cloud, I estimated it to be magnitude +4.6 on the evening of the 24th October - a fairly easy naked eye comet! The tail is now showing some interesting features too.”
More pics Here.
Nice!
It's the mark of the end of times.....the omen....
whoooooohhhh....whooooooooh.....
Beautiful..
Saw it tonight from my back yard. I didn't have the energy to haul the scope out, but just used some 7x50 binoculars. The tail was barely detectable, but the nucleus was easy to spot.
It's on strike? Well, at least it's environmentally friendly.
Meh.
The comet we saw while we were cruising back home on the USS PELELIU through the Indian Ocean in '95 was bigger.
Place your palms together, put them over your head and open your arms about 3.5 feet.
That was how big that comet was. I learned years later that it had some Japanese name starting with the letter, "H." But I called it my Birthday Comet since that's when it arrived.
Comet Hyakutake
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/comet/hyakutake/
and for lots of images
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/comet/hyakutake/images.html
So I like live in the South. What direction should I be looking tomorrow night and what time
Yep! That was the one.
It may not be viewable depending on where you live exactly.. The comet would be seen near the Corona Borealis also called the Northern Crown, http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/constellations/coronaborealis.html..
wiki has some good info as well, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Borealis
Cool!
FYI, something to do with your new scope.
C/2006 M4 (SWAN)
JPL Small-Body Database Browser
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?ID=dK06M040;orb=1;cov=0
Classification: Hyperbolic Comet
SPK-ID: 1002407
(hyperbolic orbits I think are diagnostic of comets which are just passing through, iow, not originating in the Solar System)
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