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Brightest Comet In Decades Now Visible
mlimber writes "Comet McNaught (C/2006 P1), the brightest comet in decades, is currently visible to the naked eye in the early evening and early morning sky for the northern hemisphere. The northern latitudes have the best view, but it can be seen even in the southern hemisphere during the day with the right equipment. Another image is available as NASA's astronomy picture of the day." Here is a graphic of the comet's evening location from 40 degrees north latitude.
Unfortunately, no one's perfected that device where I can wipe the clouds out of the sky so I might be able to see this event from where I call home, in the Detroit area. It's been cloudy here for the last four or five days running, so much so that it precludes viewing the comet at all. Once it does clear, the light pollution pretty much drowns out any possibility of seeing anything other than the moon in the sky. Yuk, I hate living in a heavily-populated northern clime.
MMmm another good date night! Its nice and crisp outside too.
Chicago is at 41 degrees north, and civil twilight lasts from 6:11 AM to 6:46 AM, and 5:08 PM to 5:43 PM CST, if I read it right.
Since I can only see it in the morning, where will the comet be in the morning?
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
in 3.. 2...
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A better article that gives some easy to access maps and a bit more technical information.
BTW: Does anyone know if there are future prospects for this comet? Everything seems to point at January 15th being the end of it's visibility.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
How long before we hear about another group of Keds wearing, custom web site creating freakazoids who drank the koolaide for a trip on this bad boy?
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
Nah, 4.5" is just the size of the aperture.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Someone in an above thread posted a link to a NASA animation of the orbit.
If you give the Java Applet (before anybody complains, I'd like to see you do something like this via AJAX) a minute to load and fiddle around with the controls, you can rotate around and see the comet's path relative the earth, adjusting the date a day at a time.
As you can see, between now and Jan 15th, the comet moves almost directly between the sun and the earth, and is completely lost in the glare. As the earth moves around a little further in it's orbit, the sun, comet, earth no longer form a nearly straight line, so it becomes visible again, but because it's orbit is highly inclined (it flew basically over the sun's north pole), the comet at the same time passes below the ecliptic plane. Unfortunately, this will probably be when it's at it's brightest. The upshot is our friends in the southern hemisphere should be able to catch some twilight glimpses of it then. lso, if the comet does get as bright as some of the optimistic estimates (Magnitude -8), it will even be faintly visible during the day (all over)! It will fade out of sight through February.
With an perihelion of only 0.2 AU and an aphelion of over 5000 AU, we can bet that it will be a long time before this comet swings back through the inner solar system.
...Al Steiner's _Aftermath_ over on storiesonline.net where his fictional comet Fenwell hits the Pacific Ocean and sends his characters on the way to a nuclear winter--if they can manage to survive the collapse of civilization and constant pouring rain until the sun comes out....
The spooky factor comes from the way the various scientists all thought their fictional comet was rather bright....... Check it out here: http://storiesonline.net/story/34601
--The AC