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New Comet for the New Year
spac3manspiff writes "The news has several stories about a fairly new comet named Comet Machholz discovered by Don Machholz. The comet will be able to be seen in the sky on Jan. 1 and Jan. 2 or Jan. 5 through 8. Along with the comet's appearance: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will all be able to be seen with a naked eye this month. However, you will need binoculars to see the comet."
Shiny.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
so, who wants to take bets on how long before the mass suicide cults start popping up?
Karma: Negative (Mostly affected by dorm trolling)
about the McHholz happy meals.
Not even the submitters seem to RTFA anymore. The article clearly states This comet currently is glowing at around magnitude 3.5 and is visible to the naked eye in dark, non-light polluted skies. I.e. the "you need a binoc to see it" it utter BS.
All I see is clouds and falling snow.
no
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What are the odds of that? I've never even heard of that last name before, so they got to be up there.
It *would* be, had somebody bothered to proofread the summary.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Doesn't it seem like that's the type of thing the submitter or michael would have noticed? Omet? I mean, come on. :-) I think somebody had a little too much to drink last night.
what, you were expecting a /. article without any typos or misspellings?
Well, I *just* got a pair of binoculars for Christmas.
I read TFA, but I have no idea where to look for this thing. Does anyone know where to look, say, if you live in upstate New York?
...the Machholz Comet is named after the guy who really discovered it. Bob Comet.
SpaceWeather has a spotting map. Should be easy to spot if you can find Orion and the Pleiades.
> I think they mean Comet.
Shame on a bunch of Slashdotters for not knowing their Star Trek trivia!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
From TFA
Mass suicide cults don't pop up, they pop off.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
If you need to figure out where in the sky those planets are, try kstars. It is one of the better planetarium-type apps out there.
Now if only the 'summer' skies over New Zealand would clear for a night, I can actually make use of my shiny new telescope.
--
Stellar Linux VPS Hosting
Could somebody please explain to me why I have to be naked to view these things? It's especially nasty now in January.
uhm, nice link jackass (you may be into gay porn but I am not ;)
... so here you go
anyway...dont click it people
dunno if its the poster's "fault" or if there is something wrong with yahoo.com/konqueror/firefox though, but looking at the link I think someone is crying for some attention
Oh, bravo! Thank you for close-captioning for the sarcasm-impaired.
It is these types of comets that frustrate people who are interested in astronomy but don't know where to look.
You will not see it with the naked eye unless you are under very dark skies away from city lights. You will have more luck with binoculars and even then it will only appear as a dim smudge of light.
Finding it in the sky will be an exercise in frustration unless you are already comfortable orienteering the night sky. Your best bet will be on January 8th, when the comet will be just to the right of the Pleiades, an easily locatable star cluster in Taurus.
This page at Sky & Telescope has a decent finder map. Happy hunting and even if you don't see it, enjoy the night air. It's good for you...
OMG WHERE!?
so we made it to 2005 just to be crushed before february? damn! not again!
"be able to be seen by the naked eye"
"be visible to the naked eye"
which is more concise? which is prettier? which is clearer?
What a bogus statement! The comet does not thake a few days off, it's going to be just as visable on January 3rd and 4th as on January 2nd and January 5th. There's a nice chart here that shows where in the sky to expect it each night.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's been quite bright (for a comet) in southern hemisphere skies for about a month now, and it's certainly worth going out to look at. I went out to look at it (from where I live in New Zealand) on December 11th. It was very easy to find in binoculars then (although I'm an amateur astronomer)... that was about mag 5.5. I haven't had a chance to see it since then because of bad weather.
If it's approaching mag 3.5 as the article suggests, it's getting very bright for a comet. If you're in reasonably unpolluted skies and know where to look, you might see it with an unaided eye. If you can't, though, you could probably see it in binoculars at least from low-lit suburban areas if you keep away from glare. Look with binoculars anyway, if you can, and you'll see a lot more. Frequently a reasonable pair of binoculars will reveal a lot more than a toy department store telescope.
If you're not sure where to look, keep in mind that you may also be able to contact a local observatory or astronomical society, and ask if they're having any open nights where you can have a look at it.
Don't expect anything really spectacular, of course. Most comets are a smudge on the background of the sky. Give your eyes time to adjust to what you're seeing, too. Like most thinks in amateur astronomy, you see more for the longer that you look at them. If you watch the comet over several nights, you may also see the appearence change quite a lot.
The linked yahoo article is quite misleading when it mentions brightness. It states that it's possible to see down to mag 6.5 in the most unpolluted skies. I think the author is confusing the difference between point sources of light, such as stars, and other sources. Comets are diffuse objects, and the comet magnitude describes the total amount of light that the surface emits. For this reason, a comet will appear significantly fainter than a star of the same magnitude. The exact difference depends on just how diffuse the comet is. Keep in mind, though, that even though it's bright, it's unlikely to leap out at you.
They forgot the Sun.
Hopefully NASA will blow up the comet up for our viewing pleasure.
s ter.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/01/01/comet.bu
I have not seen a celestial event as cool as the Hale Bopp comet.
That was truly amazing.
The Comet Machholz must not be too big because no "Heaven's Gate Type Cult" has been found dead with Nikes on their feet and cyanide laced lips yet!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Anyone for "I survived 1/1/2005" underwear?
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
Nah, then they would have spelled it with a v.
Just as long as noone makes any nice hot cups of tea near it we'll be OK then.
This is the 10th comet found by Don Macholz, and only now has he hung his name on one? If this one isn't really Macholz 10, I'd love to know who he named the first nine after.
Who is John Cabal?
Thanks to www.heavens-above.com
Checkout this handy guide: Comet Machhholz(C/2004 Q2)
It helps if you first register your observing location.
... fairly new comet named Comet Machholz discovered by Don Machholz.
Wow! What are the odds that the guy would discover a commet which has his same last name! Amazing.
And its not like Machholz is a popular last name among commets either!
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Have you checked your bank account lately?
: )
--
Not gullible enough to buy a SCO IP license
>>That so many heavenly bodies will be visible leads one to suspect whether the gravitation pull of those bodies may have been just "so" to irritate the surface of the earth, causing the recent tsunami.
"One", maybe, but not anyone with half a clue about physics or astronomy.
Just a link to pic of Bob Comet
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
"be able to be seen by the naked eye"
"be visible to the naked eye"
which is more concise? which is prettier? which is clearer?
And is either one true? If you can locate and see the Andromeda galaxy with your undressed, er, unaided eye (I just barely can, and I'm in pretty dark skies 60 miles away from a major city), you might be able to see Comet Machholz unaided, but as of last night (dark skies before the moon rose) I can't, not without binoculars. Maybe it will be a little brighter over the next week or so.
Tag lost or not installed.
It's obviously gnaa. Get with the program.
In very basic terms -
- face south
- point your arm up at 11 o'clock
There is a cluster of stars, the Pleiades.
-- a little beneath that, to the left, is a "triangle" of stars, much more spaced out than the Pleiades. This is Taurus**.
The Pleiades, Taurus and Machholz make an almost perfect triangle - Machholz being the bottom right point.
It will be smudge-like, like a little cloud.
kulakovich
* I'm in North America, you insensitive clod!
** yes, one appears to be a "double" star. ~ six stars total including that.
You forgot Earth. :)
Tens of thousands of /. geeks will now rush to check out teh new comet, sending it up in a puff of vapor. Oh, wait a minute...
Historically comets have been considered a sign of doom. Whenever they arrived they brought destruction and death. This time when Maccholz comes closer to earth, we see tsunamis kill thousands of people. Is this still a coincidence?
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or even plate tectonics...
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Not being serious, but it is kinda cool that we have a comet on the first day of the new year. The guys in medeival times would be freaking out probably.
but who was the dumb fucker who modded it "informative"?
I'm not even an amateur astronomer, and I was able to easily find this comet and view it with my inexpensive 10x binoculars. Now that I know where to look I can see it out without the binoculars (kind of like a fuzzy star), but it was easier to first find it with them. With the binoculars I can clearly see the coma. It appears about as long as it is wide.
If you can find the Seven Sisters and Orion then you can easily find the comet relative to them.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Don't you see However, you will need binoculars to see the comet. in the last sentence of the summary, or do you need binoculars to see that too?
if we see the cult group from the 90's, heaven's gate, on that comet, then ill be damned that their religion was the right one...
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
Comet magnitudes (as well as galaxies and nebulae) are integrated magnitudes. That is, the magnitude measurement comes from integrating the light over the entire "surface" of the object. The magnitude is calculated from the total amount of light gathered from the object over the entire area of the sky that the object occupies.
In other words, those 3.5 magnitudes are spread out over the entire "surface" of the comet, as opposed to a 3.5 magnitude star, in which the light is almost perfectly concentrated into a single point. This means that a 3.5 magnitude comet (while it likely is visible to the naked eye) is a lot fainter to the eye than a 3.5 magnitude star.
Basically, when it comes to comets, galaxies, and nebulae, what really matters is the surface brightness (magnitudes/arc-second), not the integrated magnitude, which doesn't necessarily tell you anything about just how easy (or difficult) to spot an object might be. For example, there are several galaxies that have rather high integrated magnitudes (between 4 and 5), that are nearly impossible to spot without binoculars even under the best of conditions. They have large integrated magnitudes, but their surface brightness is actually quite a bit below the threshold for the human eye to detect.
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Any news yet of another natural disaster sent to wipe out the fathers who sold their children into prostitution in the first place or the American tourists who fly to Thailand to have sex with children?
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
But bthe Heaven's Gate Cult (at least MarshallApplewhite - the leader) had been around preaching about Jesus coming on a comet since the late 70's - right?
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Here in Gold Coast AU, this comet is entirely unimpressive in my 120mm refractor. Kind of like a diffuse ball of light with a slightly brighter center. Believe me if you miss this "naked eye" comet, don't lose any sleep !
It's a well-known fact to those of us who grew up in the non-NYC, non-LI parts of the state that nobody actually LIVES "Upstate:"
I was born in Poughkeepsie; everything north of Kingston or so was considered "upstate."
My mother, who grew up in Kingston, considered "upstate" to start somewhere around Albany.
My brother went to RPI, in Troy just north of Albany. When he lived there "upstate" began around Saratoga, to a Saratogan, "upstate" starts in Lake George, to a Lake Georgian, Lake Placid is the start and so on...
Even a Plattsburgher doesn't live "upstate" if you ask him, but his brother-in-law Joe in Chazy? Now Joe, HE lives upstate!
As somebody who later moved further south to Westchester County, I always had a giggle when getting off the GW bridge and onto the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx, where the sign directing drivers to the Northbound lanes used to read "Upstate" instead of "Yonkers."
well I just ran the numbers. Seems that an average sized commet of about 4x10 14 kg and this comet's closest point will exert about 60,000 times more of a gravitational force on the earth than a 100 kg man standing on the surface of the earth.
oh forgot to say, the actual forces are still VERY small