Posted by
michael
on from the head-in-the-stars dept.
TrinSF writes "SFGate.com, run by the San Francisco Chronicle, has a story on Comet Ikeya-Zhang. It's on a 350 year cycle, and should be visible to the naked eye in some places over the next few weeks. Here's a gallery of pictures, too."
Interestingly, according to the article, it's exactly five years after Hale-Bopp was in the sky... any other screwball cults out there? (no, pointing a $c13n+0l0gy (I hope I don't get sued) story doesn't count)
"screwball" is such a tough to define word, really, we should be careful not to accuse any organization of being a cult. I, for one, have told my followers that the comet will only take those of us pure of heart and mind, so most outsiders are safe from our plans for global domination. rest easy, brothers, I'm making applesauce only for us chosen few.
Even more impressive is that comet Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake appeared within a year of each other.
I took some pretty cool shots of comet hyakutake back in my amateur days. Just staring up in the sky and seeing a big cloudy star that seemed like it was BLAZING through space, but frozen in time... just made my jaw drop and made my heart skip a beat.
Can't wait until this comet rounds the sun for a better view in April. Hopefully I'll have my 8 inch reflector by then.
The best way to find the comet right now after twilight, Jones said, is to look below and to the right of the ruddy planet Mars, which lies above bright Venus, "a clenched fist or two above the western horizon," as Jones put it.
That has to be one of the best ways I've heard to describe how to find something in the sky:)
My copy of SMCT (Soldiers Manual of Common Tasks) gives the fist method as a way to measure elevation... they're talking about what part of the sky to search for when looking for airplanes. It is rather easy for a non-astronomer who can't visuallize degrees to do in the field, and it makes a quick verification if you have no equipment handy.
-- --
Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Re:"Clenched fist"
by
ryants
·
· Score: 3, Informative
A clenched fist at arm's length covers about 10 degrees of sky. The sun moves about 10 degrees / hour, so seeing how many "fists" from the sun to the horizon gives a good approximation the number of hours of daylight left.
Note: this is all from hazy memory, so I may be wrong.
Of course it is almost 12 hours, the first day of spring was less than a week ago! In 3 months we'll have the longest day of the year, and in 9 months from now, we'll have the shortest day of the year. Haven't you ever noticed the days get a lot longer/shorter depending on the seasons?
Well, it *does* travel 15 degrees per hour . . . its amazing that we're not aware of the suns movement through the sky,
Umm, didn't Copernicus and Galileo straighten this out a few centuries ago? The sun, while moving in relation to the rest of the universe, isn't really moving in relation to the earth. The earth is moving around the sun and at the same time rotating in relation to the sun to give the appearance to an earth bound observer that the sun is moving accross the sky. In reality the sky is moving across the sun.
[sarcasm] Wow, and you SlashDot guys think you know something about science?[/sarcasm]
Comet Madness?
by
User+956
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
"In 1910, when it was announced that Halley's Comet would once again pass the earth, hysteria broke out in Europe, based on the belief that the arrival of this comet always heralded castrophe. The war of 66 A.D. that brought about the fall of Jerusalem, the devastation of Rome by the Huns in 373, the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (it is Halley's Comet that can be seen in the famous Bayeux Tapestry, announcing the death of Harold), and many other tragic events did in fact coincide with the comet's appearance.
Whether or not these occurrences actually had anything to do with the comet anxiety spread throughout Europe as soon as its impending arrival was announced, and thousands of people fled to the mountains for safety. A group of French scientists published a paper claiming that the earth would be poisoned by fumes from the comet's tail.
Reports of 'comet insanity' and suicide attempts filled the newspapers, and 'anticomet pills' guaranteeing protection from the comet's noxious fumes, where bought up eagerly.
The comet, however, came and went without much incident"
- David Louis
from his book: 2201 Fascinating Facts
Doesn't this remind you of the madness today?
-- The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Re:Comet Madness?
by
phillymjs
·
· Score: 3, Funny
'anticomet pills' guaranteeing protection from the comet's noxious fumes, were bought up eagerly.
Well, I'm off to eBay to post a few pill bottles full of Skittles with the "S" logos rubbed off!
This'll be as easy as selling Nikes to Heaven's Gaters.:-)
Hale-Bopp was awesome and it had the added advantage of culling the low end of the gene pool.
--
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
Re:hopes for us on the right coast (pun intended)
by
suss
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Well, those of us on the East coast missed out on the Leonids, is there any hopes of us seeing this?
It's a comet, not a meteor shower. I can't see it with the naked eye here (52 degrees north), but it's visible with binoculars. Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp were much easier to find...
I remember those days well. It was all part of the nervous hysteria in the lead up to Y2K. The Comet itself was well publicized by Art Bell, from the previous november or so to January 16th of that year, when they exposed the hoaxsters live on the air.
That group in sandiago (who made lots of money as an offbeat web development company) offed themselves in march or april, claiming that the ealier events did not matter.
Hale-Bopp was a nice smudge, good for quiet talks with your girl in the darkness while you waited for your night vision to kick in so you could see more and more of the tail. But the winner for best comet ever has to be Shoemaker-Levy in 1994, which struck Jupiter on camera in a series of cataclysmic explosions that destroyed the comet itself, as well as the UFO that must have been following behind, full of aliens committing mass suicide in their mission to enter the afterlife in San Diego and find a bunch of brainwashed Nike-wearing New Age cult members who could teach them how they could live in paradise and make the rent on a multimillion dollar villa by being overpaid web designers during the mid-nineties. (For its part, Jupiter didn't seem to be too bothered by any of this and gobbled up the whole entourage with an enormous appetite.)
After that, I'm jaded. Unless a comet collides with a planet, it's a flop and I don't care. I mean, I recognize that a cult mass suicide is always an honor for any comet, but what I really want to see is a collision between two solar system bodies. This Ikeya-Zhang looks like it's going to be a big disappointment- mostly staying below the horizon except during daylight hours. You won't see it unless you wake up really early and look at the horizon in the few minutes before the sun comes up and ruins everything. (And it isn't even going to smash into anything. What a ripoff! What are my NASA tax dollars going, anyway?) Halley's comet pulled the same kind of stunt 16 years ago- it actually stayed on the other side of the sun from us, like it was trying to hide! You would think such a letdown would have triggered a mass cult suicide in 1986, but you would be wrong.
Tracking interplanetary objects?
by
extrasolar
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Is there any free software that will allow me to track interplanetary objects perhaps with a display? In other words, I would like to know where asteroids, comets, and even planets are at any given time in real space (I'm not much of an amateur astronomer though--so sky coordinates wouldn't be so useful for me). Is there any existing software that would do that?
If not, can someone point me to or explain to me the mathematics behind the orbits of interplanetary objects? If so, I think I would be able to write the software myself. I suppose I would need to know the conventions used for the orbits of existing objects so I could input new objects into the system.
Thanks. If you don't like public forums, you can email me at kholmes@sedona.net.
Re:Tracking interplanetary objects?
by
pfalstad
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Home Planet does a good job, and has an orrery display as well as a sky view.
you'll also want the orbital elements, which can be put into the cometnew.csv file so you know where all the latest comets are (including Ikeya-Zhang)
Re:Tracking interplanetary objects?
by
ender81b
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If you make a open-source program, email it to me. I'd love to try it out. bill_dinger@N.O.S.P.A.M.yahoo.com
Re:Tracking interplanetary objects?
by
Shooter6947
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Use Xephem -- you download and compile the source 'cuz it was developed for Unix systems, hence its Linux & FreeBSD friendly. Its also a FreeBSDport, which makes it trivial for you to install should you be so fortunate as to be running that OS.
Re:Right on time
by
xdistak
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, Snopes (http://www.snopes2.com) dispels that rumor in fashion.
Claim: A 1654 Nostradamus prediction said World War III would begin with the fall of "two brothers," a reference to the destroyed World Trade Center towers.
Status: False.
A similar quote is:
"In the City of God there will be a great thunder,
Two brothers torn apart by Chaos,
while the fortress endures,
the great leader will succumb,
The third big war will begin when the big city is burning"
Nostradamus 1654
The quote has been modified and sent in chain letter fashion across the internet, but Nostradamus cannot claim credit for it. A college student made up the quote in 1997, in order to show how prophecies can be applied to almost any given situation. Anyways, the Snopes article is a great read on this exact quote, under 'Rumors of War'. Hell, the exact webpage is http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/predict.htm.
Build Your Own Telescope
by
goingware
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm building my own telescope, an 8 inch (wide) reflector. You can build a telescope too, very inexpensively and with modest materials.
It's very interesting and enjoyable. Try it! Maybe you'll discover a comet too someday.
True, to purchase an 8 inch reflector isn't that bad anymore, but with the skill you gain from building a small telescope you would become able to build a much larger telescope affordably; to buy one, say a 20 inch, would be beyond the financial reach of most working people, but you could reasonably build one. Many people do.
The amateur telescope making mailing list will be glad to help you out. Mel Bartels has a lot of
telescope making links.
Nucleus closeup
by
Shooter6947
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I took this image of the comet nucleus from the Steward Observatory1.6m Kuiper Telescope on top of Mt. Bigelow in Arizona on March 4. I took it for a friend of mine who's trying to nail down the comet's rotational period -- difficult to do when you can only observe it for about 1/2 hour each night before it sets. This is a raw image with a log stretch -- the dynamic range in brightness between the nucleus (saturated in the center), the coma (fuzzy part around bright area), and the three faint tails heading off to the left is huge (like a factor of several thousand). The area covered by the image is 5 arcminutes on a side, 1/6 the size of the full moon. The little bright lines are cosmic ray hits on the CCD, and the fat blotches (like the one above the coma) are stars.
Comets are one of the coolest things to observe in the sky because they CHANGE like every night!
Actually, if I recall correctly, comets don't necessarily have tails. Tails grow larger on a comet as it get closer to the sun and the suns radiation cause gas and ice to get off away from the sun. The comet's tail isn't usually opposite of the path of the comet.
Even if this comet is close enough to the sun, its possible that the tail is pointing away or towards the earth and therefore not detectable from our point of view.
No, I'm an expert. Yes, its a nice image:)
More Pics of Ikeya-Zhang
by
slinted
·
· Score: 2, Informative
APOD ran a great picture of Ikeya-Zhang last monday, showing how much it has flaired up since coming into the stronger solar wind. Their links give more info about the comet for those interested in such things.
Since there's not exactly been an abundance of actual observations, I'll throw my own: I saw the comet for first time at the beginning of the month (5.3.) with binoculars. Back then XEphem(a really nice program) estimated its brightness as 5.42 magnitudes; my own estimate was somewhat less, somewhere between 5.5 and 6.0 magnitudes but it's of course difficult to do this for nebulous patches of light compared to stars.;)
Since that I've seen it three times (it's been horribly cloudy in Finland during this month!), and only at last week I managed to see the tail faintly. Today weather has been nice, so maybe now I can make another observation.
I'm a bit pessimistic as far as seeing it without binoculars goes for myself; living at the edge of city means some light pollution and its nebulous appearance definitely does not make things easier. (For comparison, persons with good eyesight should be able to see stars of magnitude 6 with naked eye under good conditions and the brightness of comet should be now around magnitude 4.)
-- Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
Re:hopes for us on the right coast (pun intended)
by
suss
·
· Score: 2
To see this comet, you need:
1) a clear night 2) an unobstructed view of the horizon 3) a pair of binoculars
When you have a clouded night and/or blink, a meteor shower is gone. A comet will be visible for a much longer time, weeks or even 1 or 2 months...
There's a map on http://www.spaceweather.com to show where you should look.
The ancient battle between our rational body of knowledge and our passions is complex. I think, but could be recalling the facts incorrectly, that the original context for theory has to do with a Dionysian orgastic communion with a god. I hold we, as bio-chemical entities, are necessarily junkies. Culture has much to do with the witch's brew we self-generate to propogate our kind and stay safe. Acquiring the habit of critically questioning most, if not all, facets of one's life doesn't make for a fun person. I agree religion has little to do with the degree of intelligence of the practioner. Many of the great minds of our history is almost a list of famous religious personages who, inter alia, furthered learning when the Church of Rome was the only stable institution.
Everybody missed Halley's back in 86. It's 1910 appearance was spectacular. It filled the sky. I remember in 1986, old people were telling stories about how their parents showed it to them in 1910, and said that since they were so young, they might still be alive when it came around again. But the earth was in the wrong place in 1986. The only people who saw it were rich bastards who went on package tours to mountaintops in Peru. And all they saw was a tiny smudge through a telescope. Serves them right!
How does the first reference to something get modded as redundant? Hmm? Anyone care to explain this to me? Do moderators not view things in chronological order when the moderate or what?
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, according to the article, it's exactly five years after Hale-Bopp was in the sky... any other screwball cults out there? (no, pointing a $c13n+0l0gy (I hope I don't get sued) story doesn't count)
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
That has to be one of the best ways I've heard to describe how to find something in the sky
There's a viewers guide to the comet that might come in handy at Space.com
--Metrollica
"In 1910, when it was announced that Halley's Comet would once again pass the earth, hysteria broke out in Europe, based on the belief that the arrival of this comet always heralded castrophe. The war of 66 A.D. that brought about the fall of Jerusalem, the devastation of Rome by the Huns in 373, the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (it is Halley's Comet that can be seen in the famous Bayeux Tapestry, announcing the death of Harold), and many other tragic events did in fact coincide with the comet's appearance.
Whether or not these occurrences actually had anything to do with the comet anxiety spread throughout Europe as soon as its impending arrival was announced, and thousands of people fled to the mountains for safety. A group of French scientists published a paper claiming that the earth would be poisoned by fumes from the comet's tail.
Reports of 'comet insanity' and suicide attempts filled the newspapers, and 'anticomet pills' guaranteeing protection from the comet's noxious fumes, where bought up eagerly.
The comet, however, came and went without much incident"
- David Louis
from his book: 2201 Fascinating Facts
Doesn't this remind you of the madness today?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Hale-Bopp was awesome and it had the added advantage of culling the low end of the gene pool.
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
Well, those of us on the East coast missed out on the Leonids, is there any hopes of us seeing this?
It's a comet, not a meteor shower. I can't see it with the naked eye here (52 degrees north), but it's visible with binoculars. Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp were much easier to find...
That group in sandiago (who made lots of money as an offbeat web development company) offed themselves in march or april, claiming that the ealier events did not matter.
other details here.
don't forget to look over your shoulder.
[smile]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
we are the knights who say "icky icky Ikeya-Zhang zoooboing!"
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Dude, what the hell are you talking about? Comets are made from dust and ice, not Swedish wood...
Hale-Bopp was a nice smudge, good for quiet talks with your girl in the darkness while you waited for your night vision to kick in so you could see more and more of the tail. But the winner for best comet ever has to be Shoemaker-Levy in 1994, which struck Jupiter on camera in a series of cataclysmic explosions that destroyed the comet itself, as well as the UFO that must have been following behind, full of aliens committing mass suicide in their mission to enter the afterlife in San Diego and find a bunch of brainwashed Nike-wearing New Age cult members who could teach them how they could live in paradise and make the rent on a multimillion dollar villa by being overpaid web designers during the mid-nineties. (For its part, Jupiter didn't seem to be too bothered by any of this and gobbled up the whole entourage with an enormous appetite.)
After that, I'm jaded. Unless a comet collides with a planet, it's a flop and I don't care. I mean, I recognize that a cult mass suicide is always an honor for any comet, but what I really want to see is a collision between two solar system bodies. This Ikeya-Zhang looks like it's going to be a big disappointment- mostly staying below the horizon except during daylight hours. You won't see it unless you wake up really early and look at the horizon in the few minutes before the sun comes up and ruins everything. (And it isn't even going to smash into anything. What a ripoff! What are my NASA tax dollars going, anyway?) Halley's comet pulled the same kind of stunt 16 years ago- it actually stayed on the other side of the sun from us, like it was trying to hide! You would think such a letdown would have triggered a mass cult suicide in 1986, but you would be wrong.
Is there any free software that will allow me to track interplanetary objects perhaps with a display? In other words, I would like to know where asteroids, comets, and even planets are at any given time in real space (I'm not much of an amateur astronomer though--so sky coordinates wouldn't be so useful for me). Is there any existing software that would do that?
If not, can someone point me to or explain to me the mathematics behind the orbits of interplanetary objects? If so, I think I would be able to write the software myself. I suppose I would need to know the conventions used for the orbits of existing objects so I could input new objects into the system.
Thanks. If you don't like public forums, you can email me at kholmes@sedona.net.
Actually, Snopes (http://www.snopes2.com) dispels that rumor in fashion. Claim: A 1654 Nostradamus prediction said World War III would begin with the fall of "two brothers," a reference to the destroyed World Trade Center towers. Status: False. A similar quote is: "In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb, The third big war will begin when the big city is burning" Nostradamus 1654 The quote has been modified and sent in chain letter fashion across the internet, but Nostradamus cannot claim credit for it. A college student made up the quote in 1997, in order to show how prophecies can be applied to almost any given situation. Anyways, the Snopes article is a great read on this exact quote, under 'Rumors of War'. Hell, the exact webpage is http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/predict.htm.
It's very interesting and enjoyable. Try it! Maybe you'll discover a comet too someday.
True, to purchase an 8 inch reflector isn't that bad anymore, but with the skill you gain from building a small telescope you would become able to build a much larger telescope affordably; to buy one, say a 20 inch, would be beyond the financial reach of most working people, but you could reasonably build one. Many people do.
The amateur telescope making mailing list will be glad to help you out. Mel Bartels has a lot of telescope making links.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Comets are one of the coolest things to observe in the sky because they CHANGE like every night!
APOD ran a great picture of Ikeya-Zhang last monday, showing how much it has flaired up since coming into the stronger solar wind. Their links give more info about the comet for those interested in such things.
Since there's not exactly been an abundance of actual observations, I'll throw my own: I saw the comet for first time at the beginning of the month (5.3.) with binoculars. Back then XEphem(a really nice program) estimated its brightness as 5.42 magnitudes; my own estimate was somewhat less, somewhere between 5.5 and 6.0 magnitudes but it's of course difficult to do this for nebulous patches of light compared to stars. ;)
Since that I've seen it three times (it's been horribly cloudy in Finland during this month!), and only at last week I managed to see the tail faintly. Today weather has been nice, so maybe now I can make another observation.
I'm a bit pessimistic as far as seeing it without binoculars goes for myself; living at the edge of city means some light pollution and its nebulous appearance definitely does not make things easier. (For comparison, persons with good eyesight should be able to see stars of magnitude 6 with naked eye under good conditions and the brightness of comet should be now around magnitude 4.)
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
To see this comet, you need:
1) a clear night
2) an unobstructed view of the horizon
3) a pair of binoculars
When you have a clouded night and/or blink, a meteor shower is gone. A comet will be visible for a much longer time, weeks or even 1 or 2 months...
There's a map on http://www.spaceweather.com to show where you should look.
their religious fever overrode rational thought.
The ancient battle between our rational body of knowledge and our passions is complex. I think, but could be recalling the facts incorrectly, that the original context for theory has to do with a Dionysian orgastic communion with a god. I hold we, as bio-chemical entities, are necessarily junkies. Culture has much to do with the witch's brew we self-generate to propogate our kind and stay safe. Acquiring the habit of critically questioning most, if not all, facets of one's life doesn't make for a fun person. I agree religion has little to do with the degree of intelligence of the practioner. Many of the great minds of our history is almost a list of famous religious personages who, inter alia, furthered learning when the Church of Rome was the only stable institution.
cheersheuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
Too bad you missed Halley's back in 1986.
Everybody missed Halley's back in 86. It's 1910 appearance was spectacular. It filled the sky. I remember in 1986, old people were telling stories about how their parents showed it to them in 1910, and said that since they were so young, they might still be alive when it came around again. But the earth was in the wrong place in 1986. The only people who saw it were rich bastards who went on package tours to mountaintops in Peru. And all they saw was a tiny smudge through a telescope. Serves them right!
How does the first reference to something get modded as redundant? Hmm? Anyone care to explain this to me? Do moderators not view things in chronological order when the moderate or what?
What?