[X] My Assistant

[Stu]

This has been in the news for a week or so now, with many "experts" predicting it might become very bright around Jan 8-10th in the evening sky as seen from the n hemisphere.

And, after several nights of wasting my time and freezing my fingers off, I'm happy to be able to report my first sighting of Comet McNaught!! Frustrated by great black pillows of cloud in the comet's direction last night, but a very clear WSW horizon tonight lured me back up the sloppy-mud covered track that leads up to Kendal Castle, and from there, at 16.49, I got my first glimpse of the comet. Phew!!

It wasn't visible to the naked eye - well, not my naked eye, anyway - but it is very, very easy to see in binoculars, its head a star-like point and an obvious (and very straight, I thought...) tail stabbing away from it at almost a 45degree angle. The head looked orange-yellowish in my 10x50s, and there seemed, when using averted vision, to be quite a fan-shaped tail sweeping to the upper right. Unfortunately I didn't get to see the comet in a darker sky because it started playing hide and seek behind several horizontal bands of cloud, but my last sighting of it this evening, at 17.05, was very nice... orange-grey sky, streaked with lines of cloud, and Comet McNaught glinting above them like a spark.

Here's hoping others had some luck tonight too!

[dvandorn]

The first comet I tried to see was Ikeya-Seki in 1968 (I believe it was). It flew too close to the Sun and disintegrated, if I recall correctly, and so the impressive display we were supposed to see in the northern hemisphere never materialized. (I think I have this right -- I was only 12 at the time, and all I recall really clearly is that I was never able to see the thing, which was a big disappointment at the time.)

The first comet I remember actually seeing was Bennett in 1970. I had received a small telescope (3" reflector) for Christmas, and so when Bennett became clear and naked-eye visible in the early spring, I was out in my back yard (at ridiculous-o'clock-in-the-morrning, especially for a 14-year-old) with my 'scope, looking at the comet. I never saw a nucleus; I think all my 'scope was able to resolve was the coma. The tail was well defined, though, and some very nice knots and streamers were visible, if fainter than I would have expected.

As for more recent comets, Hyakutake wasn't nearly as impressive to me as Hale-Bopp was. Perhaps we in the northern hemisphere didn't get a really good viewing angle on Hyakutake, but all I ever recall seeing of it was a fuzzy blotch in the sky with a tail that you had to look away from it to see -- it faded to invisibility if you looked directly at it.

Hale-Bopp, however... that was the most impressive comet I've ever seen. Its tail was also not as bright and noticeable as I would have expected -- after a certain distance from the nucleus, it was best seen out of the corner of one's eye. But in very clear and dark skies, it was an amazing site.

Especially from the air... you see, in April of '97 I went to England on business, and as we flew through the (very short) night along the Great Circle route up north of the Arctic Circle, I saw the most impressive sight I can ever recall: green curtains of auroral displays draping the horizon, with Hale-Bopp hovering barely five degrees above the horizon, its dust tail forming a great sweeping filament that seemed to flow up and out of the auroras, its ion tail flashing brightest of all, bluish against the green of the auroras.

It was a view worth the price of the trip...

-the other Doug