[Maggie's blog] Comet Watch

If you’re an astronomy buff, you might know that Comet Pan-STARRS has been gracing our early evening skies over the last few weeks. I was pretty excited about this because when I was in college, we had two spectacularly bright comets appear – Hayakutake and Hale-Bopp – a year apart.

Pan-STARRS definitely wasn’t the same experience for me as those two bright comets were. Though Pan-STARRS did apparently get bright enough to be naked-eye visible, you had to be at a dark location. It was also a tricky comet to view, because it was at its nearest approach to the Sun, which put it close to the Sun in the sky. This also meant that the comet was very low on the horizon, and it wasn’t visible for terribly long after sunset. It was a balancing act of waiting for the comet to be dark enough to view, without it being too low in the sky. Another disadvantage we had was that Washington, DC is directly to the west of our house, so the lights of the city tend to wash out that part of the sky. Without a known dark-sky site within a reasonable distance, my husband and I tried to be backyard astronomers instead.

We tried twice without binoculars with no luck. Then we ordered a pair, and the timing worked in our favor. We were clouded out for a few days, but by the time the binoculars arrived, it had cleared up. One more try from the backyard failed, and then we got the idea of going up onto the roof of our house. Almost immediately the comet was spotted… just before it set behind the trees.

We managed to catch it on a second night – and I am glad I saw it. But I’m still hoping that Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON), due in November, will be even brighter and as spectacular as the comets of my youth.

I did attempt to see if an iPhone could register Pan-STARRS through binoculars. The answer? Yes. But it looks like a single bright pixel:

Credit: Maggie Masetti

In contrast, here are *cough* scans of film pictures I took of Hayakutake (top) and Hale-Bopp (bottom) – Hayakutake was particularly stunning, and in a dark sky, its tail seemed to span the whole sky.

Credit: Maggie Masetti

Credit: Maggie Masetti

Though my pic of Pan-STARRS was unspectacular, there have been some really lovely photos of it. Some of my friends volunteered their own, and others I’ve seen online.

Here’s one taken by my friend Craig Markwardt from NASA Goddard:

Credit: Craig Markwardt

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[Blog] Awesomeness Round-Up – 1/4/12

There are gorgeous new images out from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Here, Saturn’s third-largest moon, Dione, can be seen through the haze of the planet’s largest moon, Titan, in this view of the two posing before the planet and its rings. There are more on the Cassini website.

Credit: NASA

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