Slashdot Mirror
Comet Machholz Now Visible to Naked Eye
An anonymous reader submits "A comet discovered only this summer is brightening quickly and already visible to the unaided eye. Comet Macholz should be visible to the unaided eye until late January. On the night of January 7 - 8, it will sail about 2 degrees (4 Moon widths) to the west of the easily recognisable Pleiades star cluster, often known as the Seven Sisters. It will be at its closest to Earth Jan. 5-6, 2005, when it will be 32 million miles away." (Mentioned a few days ago, too.)
"I make it a point to never to turn my head unless I expect to see something, Bart. Naturally, we can't see your comet in broad daylight and without a telescope."
On Topic, will this be visible from the sothern hemisphere?
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Since this is slashdot:
mach -> make
holz -> wood
newly discovered comet -> new star
It's the making of Wormwood! Forget all that Chernobyl hocus pocus. Maybe when Tempel 1 gets impacted, a piece will hit machholz causing it to make a direct course for Earth.
We're doomed!
What good are all those billions we spend for NASA's budget, when we don't even have a single hydrogen bomb-carrying spaceship? Can we trust the Space Administration to be able to dig up even a single team of expert oil drillers to blow up Machholz once it's inevitably revealed as the Texas-sized planet killer it surely is? I think not.
Perihelion is wednesday and snow is predicted all week here in Michigan. I need to move to a better climate.
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From one of the articles: "In binoculars, look for an object that is fuzzy compared with the much more distant stars."
This doesn't really meet my definition of "naked eye." I guess I was expecting something like the Hale-Bopp comet which was easily visible to the unaided, naked eye. This one appears to be much farther away.
Check out Chad's News
...in my experience means: "Visible to the naked eye of an experienced observer under the age of 40 with good eyesight whose eyes have been dark-adapted for at least half an hour, on a clear night in dry weather with no moon, at time at least three hours after sunset or three hours when the object is at least 40 degrees above the horizon, on a hill with dry air at least a fifty miles from any town with a population of over 2,000 ."
If you can see and count seven Pleiades and if you are in a place where you would notice the Milky Way without anyone mentioning it to you, then, sure, it might be visible to the naked eye.
To the average Joe stumbling out into his suburban backward, it's not all that conspicuous even in binoculars.
Telling people that the comet is "visible to the naked eye" is just setting them up for disappointment, particularly after they've seen innumerable big-observatory long-exposure photos showing huge comets with long dramatic tails... or cartoons where the animator has somehow gotten comets confused with bolides.
The last time Halley's came around, a Boston Globe columnist trotted out the usual mantra about finding a spot on a hill far from city lights. So, with some persistence, I phoned him up and said that I was really tired of columns telling me to find a spot on a hill far from city lights that didn't tell me where to find such a hill within thirty miles of Boston. I mean, Great Blue Hill with its spectacular view of the dazzling city lights of Boston is exactly what you don't want. He said "I really have no answer for you. There is a place I go to but it's sixty miles from Boston and it's private property."
When you have a really good view of the sky, which I've had maybe half a dozen times in my life, it's hard to find the constellations because you see too many starts. The bright stars that the H. A. Rey diagrams connect with dots are almost lost in a sparkly mist of hundreds of other visible stars that seem nearly as bright. I'm convinced that the ancients did not see the constellations as stick figures, but as three-dimensional solid images in those sparkly clouds. I've no doubt that under those circumstances, the comet would be a conspicious and truly "naked-eye" object.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Anyway, in the same way that you can zoom in on the ISS, or DirecTV sattelites and eventually see all the details as if you were standing next to them, you should be able to zoom in on objects like comets for which there is not enough data for a close up, and the program should make up comical and amusing scenery.
For instance: Zoom in on mars, and you might see Opertunity. If you watch for a few seconds, little cartoon green elves with faces resembling The Pep Boys walk up to the rover bearing rags and Windex and start washing the solar panels.
For a comet closeup, you could see Bruce Willis standing on it waving back at you.
It would be cool to see Marvin the Martian and the Hairy just-add-water monsters running around, or Monoliths on the moon, and in orbit around Jupiter. Science fiction characters with specified locations could populate the known universe. Huge Green Froggish People from Omicron Persei Eight...
From here in Texas near Dallas, the shores of Lake Tawakoni to be exact, I saw it true naked eye on Saturday night. A definite little fuzzball south southwest of the Pleiades. Simply, at 10PM or so go stand outside for a while and avoid looking at any lights. Face south and then look straight up. You should see the Pleiades almost overhead and Orion to the east. Follow a line from Bellatrix (HIS left shoulder as he faces you) through his his outstretched arm to his bow and keep going until you've crossed south of the Pleiades.
:-)
Using some good medium/compact 8x40 binocs and averted vision I could pick up a tail drifting off to the east northeast. Can't see it at all from the city as it has been cloudy since we got back in town. I plan to take my big astro-binocs, telescope, and camera next weekend.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Comet: it makes your face turn green
O, Comet: it smells like Listerine!
O, Comet: It makes you vomit
So buy some Comet and vomit today!
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer