Go Have a Look at Comet Holmes!

Photo by Douglas Slauson

I've blogged about celestial events before. There was the Space Shuttle-International Space Station sighting, the Perseid meteor shower, the lunar eclipse, and more recently, the moon and Venus side by side. Now there's another one and if you don't go out and look for it, you're really missing something.

Comet Holmes first came on the scene in 1892, when Edward Holmes discovered it, visible then to the naked eye. Fourteen years later, it was lost to astronomers until 1964. Normally quite boring, on October 24th it experienced what is called an outburst. Most probably, a part of the comet experienced collapse, with particles being expelled and causing its brightness to increase dramatically to a magnitude about a million times more than normal. Lucky for us!

Over the weekend, Romie and I walked out into the backyard a couple of hours after sunset and looked up, trying to find Comet Holmes in the dark night sky. We knew to look in a northeasterly direction, just left of the constellation Perseus and about 45° off the horizon. There are a couple of very bright stars in that constellation, making it somewhat easy to find, and the comet was just as easy to locate. It looked like a cotton ball up there.

We had taken the binoculars out with us and looking through those, there was no doubt we had found it. I tried to take a photograph but had no luck. There are plenty of good photos to be found online though, like the one above, by Douglas Slauson. It's starting to get dimmer now, so if the sky is cloud-free, get out there before it's gone! It likely won't be bright enough to see with the naked eye again for a long time.

While you're out there, look directly east to see the Seven Sisters, a.k.a. The Pleiades. That will be the cluster of seven bright stars nestled among lots of dimmer ones. You can't miss it.

Happy stargazing!

I'm Over the Moon

I'm not a morning person, so it's rare that I see the sight I saw this morning. Before the clouds moved in, the sky was clear and the sun was just about to break over the horizon. Looking out the window, it was neither of those things that caught my eye however. It was this:

The moon and Venus paired up, as they often do, to decorate the dawn. Saturn's up there too, but it's not nearly as bright as Venus. I took several pictures, then came in and had some fun with Adobe Photoshop. The following four pictures were tweaked from the same original:

Total Lunar Eclipse of August 28, 2007

Time lapse: 5:02 to 5:52 AM

Waiting For A Star To Fall

At the pool party, we talked about watching the Perseid meteor shower, which started tonight. Every August, the earth passes through the tail of the comet Swift-Tuttle. When that happens, small particles of debris thrown off by the comet enter the earth's atmosphere, burning up in the process and we see it as a flash of light. In the case of bigger particles, they leave a streak across the sky.

Cool.

I'm a die-hard night owl. Staying up to watch the Perseids tonight wasn't difficult for me and I watch them every year, so around 2:00 a.m. I put on my flip-flops, grabbed a blanket (to protect myself from the mosquitoes) and my camera, and headed outside. It was a perfect night for watching, because there's no moon to dilute the darkness. We live in the middle of nowhere, so there are no city lights to contend with either. The neighbors on each side have security lights, but there's a spot by the pool where the trees block that light, so it's nice and dark and perfect for meteor watching.

I pulled the patio lounger out a bit so I could get a better view while laying on it. It had already become damp with the night moisture, so I grabbed a beach towel and wiped it off. I wrapped myself up in the blanket and plopped myself down on the lounger to watch and wait.

Hmmm . . . I forgot that I'm near-sighted. I got back up and went in the house to find my glasses, then returned to my post. I left my camera in the house this time, because after laying there for a minute, I could see that getting an image of a meteor was going to require an immeasurable amount of luck and I didn't feel that lucky.

So now I was bundled up in the blanket, lying down looking up and waiting. I heard the train whistle from the Norfolk & Southern train, three miles away. There were the crickets and frogs providing background music, with the staccato percussion from a katydid now and then. The classic night sounds of summer.

The sky is really big. With ideal conditions (meaning you're not too tired, too old, or too a-lot-of-things) the eye takes 200 milliseconds to track something, once the moving object is detected. That's pretty fast. But so is a meteor. They travel anywhere from 25,000 to 160,000 miles per hour.

I'm not a math whiz, so I'm not sure how that all works out, but I know if you're looking east and the meteor is in the west, it had better be one of the streaky ones or you're going to miss it. So I tried to look straight up and consciously use my peripheral vision to hopefully catch a glimpse of a few meteors. As I laid there, I wondered which would happen first - a mosquito bite or a meteor?

A METEOR! I saw one, and then another. I even saw one large enough to leave a streak. They averaged about one every three minutes or so and most seemed to be traveling from eastish to westish. (I know those aren't words, but they should be.) Each time I saw one, it made me smile. The streaky one even caused me to say OUT LOUD, "Now that was cool." I don't know who I thought was going to hear me say that, but it really was cool.

I laid there for about half an hour watching them and each time after I'd see one, I'd tell myself, "just one more." In all, I probably saw a dozen or more. The frequency of them increases the nearer you get to dawn, so I decided to come in, then set the alarm for 4:30 so I could go back out and see more of them. They're supposed to be visible all week but more so on Sunday and Monday nights and there's a chance of rain tomorrow night, so I want to be sure to see them all I can tonight.

I have a couple of observations that puzzle me about these things. One, the Perseids were first noted in 1863. Doesn't the comet eventually burn up? I need to study up on comets. Second, If we're passing through the path of the comet's debris, it seems like some of it should hit the earth as meteorites. Maybe it does, but apparently not much, or we'd hear about people finding them every August or getting bonked on the head by one. Wouldn't we?

Okay, so I wasn't a science major. Wait. Yes, I was. Indiana University awarded me an Associate degree in Science. But we studied teeth and I sure don't remember hearing about any comets. And this is precisely the reason that Al Gore invented the internet. Thank goodness for Google.

I'm going to go lay down on the couch now, because 4:30 will be here before I know it.


Photo from YES I Can! Science.

International Space Station Sighting!

I don't know that I've ever posted three times in one day, but this event warranted this post. Tonight, about 10:35 EDT, Romie and I stood outside in the middle of our road with our next-door neighbors and watched the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle Atlantis travel overhead. Just today, Atlantis undocked from the Space Station, and is due to land back on Earth on Thursday.

At their highest elevation that we could see here, they were 60° off the horizon, which seemed to be pretty much overhead, only better, because you could look up and watch them without getting a crook in your neck. It only took them about three minutes to traverse the sky until we couldn't see them anymore. It's pretty amazing that we could see them at all, considering they were 220 miles above us.

I ran in the house and grabbed my camera, but only half expected to get any kind of image, especially without a tripod. For the first picture, I just plopped myself right down on the grass on my back and snapped the shutter release. Being so dark, I knew I'd get some trailing of light because the shutter stayed open for several seconds, but it's still kind of neat that I captured them.


The second picture was taken when I was standing on the road looking up at them just before they disappeared from our sight. Very little trailing on this one, and I'm not sure why that is, since I was even less stabilized when taking this one.


I'm so fascinated by the night sky.