The "Exploding" comet

[altivo]

In quotes because it isn't really exploding, as far as we know. Comet 17P/Holmes, a normally insignificant object so faint that you need a hefty telescope even to see it, suddenly blossomed last week from a 17th magnitude pinprick to a 2.5 magnitude noteworthy. Currently in the constellation Perseus, it is easily visible to the naked eye after sunset, as soon as the sky darkens, in the northeast. For photos and sky diagrams, check out Spaceweather.com. Print out the chart unless you are very familiar with the night sky and have a good eidetic memory for where to look. I thought I could get it by memory and failed, had to come back into the house and memorize the diagram more precisely. I was looking too far to the north.

Although descriptions keep saying that the hazy coma around the nucleus of the comet is visible to the naked eye, I did not find it so. I have above average night vision, but without the binoculars it just looks like a second magnitude star to me. Comparing to the star chart, you realize that there isn't supposed to be a star there, and it is so bright and obvious that it never could have been missed when the chart was made. With the small pocket binoculars I use for birdwatching, the image blossoms to match the photos on the website. Yes, it looks like a pinprick of bright light surrounded by a haze of glowing gas or droplets. I kept dropping the binoculars and looking, then looking through them again. I couldn't believe the difference. My eye told me it was just a star, but the binoculars reveal the comet nature of the object. It is not displaying a tail at present.

I usually rely on Guy Ottwell's guide to the sky, but that was printed last December and of course he had no clue that this event was going to occur. In fact, 17P/Holmes isn't even mentioned, because it is normally so faint. He must already be preparing the text for the 2008 edition, or may have already sent it to print. I'm sure he'll be chagrined if he missed the chance to comment on this in retrospect.

The comet is bright enough to see even through city lights. Try to catch it between sunset and moonrise, presently between 6:30 and 9:00 pm local daylight time in the US. Unless you have a really dark sky, you'll probably need binoculars or a small telescope to see the detail. It's worth the effort though. In fact, it is much more spectacular than Halley's comet was on it's most recent appearance.

Without Ottwell's guidance, I'm at a loss to interpret the tables of orbital data available at Spaceweather.com. I don't know if the comet is approaching perihelion or already moving away from it. Perhaps someone like dakhun will tell us. If it is still inbound, then there is a possibility of a really spectacular display.

Interestingly, 17P/Holmes did something similar back in 1892 or so. Since then, it has remained quite undistinguished until this year. The speculation seems to be that the comet has sinkholes or ice caves in it, and when one collapses it exposes new surfaces to rapid evaporation and erosion all at once, producing this nova-like effect.

So why am I irritated? LIght pollution and stupid (very stupid) neighbors. It's bad enough that our once clear view of the Milky Way has been eroded by useless parking lot lighting in the blossoming suburbs 20 or 30 miles from here, but we also have an immediate next door neighbor who is apparently terrified of the dark. She keeps four blazing high powered floodlights aimed at her driveway, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They are never off. When there is snow on the ground they are blinding. They shine right in my dining room window and I could read by them in winter even though they are a football field away. Fortunately, my view to the north is best by going to the pasture, which is behind her house, away from those obnoxious lights and usually darker. Not tonight. on my second trip out there, she apparently noticed the sound of my feet in the leaves or something. Before I was done locating and examining the comet, wham, on comes another million-watt floodlight right in my face. This thing is casting shadows a full quarter mile long, and her two ill-behaved yappy dogs come charging out of the house barking at the maximum volume they can obtain. Said mutts know better than to cross the property line now, but they track me all along it as if it were a fence, barking their guts out. She stands under the floodlight calling them in a shrill voice, which they ignore, because neither of them has had the least obedience training. There is no point in arguing with her about this, she just doesn't get it. She can't understand why anyone would go out in the middle of the night to "look at stars" and is sure that anything moving around out there in the dark is either about to rob her or eat her flowerbeds.

The moon was rising anyway, so I just came back inside. I think I need to move to Wyoming or something.

When the present collapse in the housing market recovers, they will begin to progress again on the obscene development just north of me. Where there was just a 400 acre cornfield, there will be 85 suburban houses, every one of them equipped with enough light polluting and noise producing gadgetry to make me weep. Losing the Milky Way in the last ten years will be as nothing. I will lose all but the brightest stars, and all of my quiet. It will be perpetual lawnmowers by day, and blaring television receivers by night, I'm sure. My abnormally sensitive hearing detects neighbors having a party half a mile or more away now. Some 85 neighbors at a quarter mile is likely to be unbearable.

Comments

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

As chance would have it, I just came back in from observing the comet. :-)
It doesn't have a tail visible, but it is rather easy to see even with just your naked eye, as long as you know where to look. Even with light pollution from the city here, and the moon well above the horizon, I can still see it clearly.

Basically, the comet has let off one large puff of dust in a single event. As time goes on, this cloud of dust is growing larger but staying at the same brightness. Each night, the cloud will get larger and more diffuse. The comet does this sort of thing randomly and rarely, so who knows what it'll do next. The perihelion was on May 4, so it is moving farther away.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

If I want to get a good view of the night sky

Nice Death-Star like icon there. Is that Mimas, perchance?

[ruwhei.livejournal.com]

That's no space station... its a MOON!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

What I wanna know is just who's mooning whom. ;p

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Trust you to turn a magnificient celestial body into a cheap bottom gag ;)
*falls on his back giggling*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I always think that picture of Mimas looks like a beaten up 8-ball, actually.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Too late to clean it up now ;)

You mean one of those things you shake and tell your fortune?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, I was thinking of the one from the pool table, but yeah, the plastic ball full of water that "answers" questions would do as well.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is Mimas. It was taken just over two years ago by Cassini.
It is my favourite moon. :-)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for clarifying the orbital detail. It's odd that none of the write-ups I've seen have mentioned the fact that 17P/Holmes is already moving away from the sun. Too bad. If that had happened on the way in, it probably would have made quite a sight.

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

Ah. I was wondering if what I saw this evening was the comet. I didn't think there was a planet in that region of the sky, nor did it appear to be a star I was familiar with.

This place is still pretty far away from other houses, but even in the one year I've been here, the sky doesn't seem as dark as it used to.

Of course, it's nowhere as bad as it was in San Diego. I remember being able to easily see the Pleiades as a kid, but when I left California, you could barely make out Orion's belt.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We were looking at the Pleiades last night. They were still low on the horizon, and more easterly than the comet, but Gary remarked on them and asked what they were. He has poor night vision but was still able to make out the multiple stars and nebulous haze around them.

Try binoculars on the comet. It's really worth it.

[heavens-steed.livejournal.com]

I'm stupid. I hate it when I come across vocabulary I don't know. I had to look up the word "eidetic."

I had to laugh about you're neighbor and her severe case of achluophobia. It reminds me of something out of a comedy movie. Sounds like she wants her very own stars right in front of her house. XD I know you don't think it's funny and I'm sure it's annoying as hell, but it's just so ridiculous. I think she takes the phrase "shine a little light on the subject" way too seriously.

All I can say ask is, don't you just love humanity? Don't you just love how we like to be as unnatural as possible? People don't want nature anymore. I mean, why have quiet? Why listen to the gentle sound of crickets and birds when your ears can be treated to the obnoxiously loud roar of a motorcycle engine at 3 in the morning or another stupid Honda hatchback with a glass-plated muffler going down your street? Why listen to a gentle evening breeze as it breathes through the grass and tress when you can listen to a bunch of drunken and rowdy teenagers screaming and yelling next door? People don't need to look into the heavens anymore. They don't need to look at a sky that inspires awe, reverence, and wonder when they have television.

It's very sad. I've never lived out in the country, but even where I live here in suburbia, there use to be a lot of open fields around when I was kid. And considering how young I am that was not very long ago. Now there are none left. They've all been built on. I love to look at the stars. Fortunately for me, as a boy scout I had lots of opportunities to go camping and be out in areas where you could actually see the sky and the difference is incredible. I think you have a right to be cranky and genuinely sad as well.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, as you know, I'm not very fond of humanity on the whole, and especially not the lemming-like behaviors. Light and noise pollution, though, were the major things that drove me away from a perfectly good house in Chicago. In the end they mattered even more than the fact that the house was paid for and we owned it completely. Getting away from the noise was more of an attraction than the possibility of keeping my own horses.

Alas, once I got away from the constant background noise of the city, I only became more sensitive to sound. There seems to be just as much human-made noise out here, and because you can easily distinguish the individual sounds, it seems just that much more unnecessary.

The light thing is bad too, especially because the situation is deteriorating so fast. When I was a kid we could go to my grandmother's house and the sky was so brilliant that you just wanted to dive into it and slide down the Milky Way. The stars were actually colored. You didn't need a telescope to see the difference between red, orange, yellow and blue-white. Even then I used to curse someone on the other side of the lake who kept a floodlight on all night, pointed right at us. It was more than a mile away, but distracting. Now there has been a huge development surge in that area of Michigan (north of Traverse City) and I'm sure those brilliant skies have been ruined, replaced with the overall reddish glow that comes from half a million yard lights, "security" lights, street lights, neon signs, and worst of all, huge parking lot floodlights.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

By the way, not knowing the meaning of an unusual word is not stupidity. I tend to use Greek words like that more casually than I should, because I studied Greek long enough that they seem natural to me.

Not knowing something may be ignorance (another Greek word) but if you can't learn what you don't yet know even when it is explained, that might be stupidity.

And by the way, I had never seen "achluophobic" before, though it does make sense (afraid of shadows.) Other words with similar meaning are "nyctophobic" (afraid of the night), "scotophobic" (afraid of the darkness), and even "lygophobic" (afraid of twilight.) That last one gives me pause, because I often find twilight to be one of the most beautiful times of the day.

Anyway, you added a word to my vocabulary too.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Glaspak mufflers? They're quite rare for kiddies to have on their hatch backs, usually it's cheap big bore 'cannons' that are really only glorified resonators. :)

[hrrunka]

The skies have been pretty grubby here in murky south-east London, but I did get a look at the comet last night. It's interestingly weird. :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

A once in a lifetime experience. I shudder to think of what your skies are like there.

Back when everyone was ooohing and aahing over Hale-Bopp, we still lived in Chicago and it was clearly visible through the light and air pollution there. I only wish I could have gotten a clear view of it.

[hrrunka]

They could be worse. The almost-full Moon and the weather have been the chief sources of interference, but this comet's nice and bright, and the coma is a clear naked-eye object. A couple of members of my local astronomical society have already put some photos into the society's gallery.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Interesting. My skies must be clearer than yours I would think, and yet I could not see the coma without binoculars. It was certainly obvious with the aid of magnification.

[hrrunka]

We're a bit further north, I guess. Would it have been higher in the sky for us here? That makes a huge difference, given our usual air quality. I'll have to check...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

True, you're farther north. So is dakhun who likewise says he can see the coma easily. I don't think elevation is it, though, because it was quite high here, and given its current position it would pass almost overhead during the night. If it's clear again tonight, maybe I'll try checking it out later, right before bed. The problem with that is that the moon would be up by then.

[hrrunka]

Having had another look at it last night, it seems to me it's getting fainter and more difuse day by day. It looked like a slightly fuzzy star on Monday nighht. Last night it was definitely a fuzzy blob. Binoculars show it well.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That seems to be what we should expect. After some number of days or weeks, it will become so dim again that we can't see it. Cloudy here the last couple of nights, but tonight looks promising so I plan to have another look.

[hrrunka]

Hope you get a good view of it. :)

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

A comet, you say?

Well, I say it's a sign of the End Times. Every comet worth its salt is a sign of the End Times.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It's a pretty fuzzy sign then. Might be easy to misread.

If you haven't seen it, try to get a look. It's worth the effort.

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

Gotta try to catch a glimpse of that, when the weather clears up a bit. If I manage to find it, that is. The only constellation I easily recognize is Ursa Minor, and knowing that one doesn't help finding the other constellations much, since all kinda revolves around it...

Well, at least I know which way to north... =)

I guess light pollution isn't quite as bad over here, or there's less particles in the atmosphere to reflect the light back, since I can get quite nice views just from my back yard. But going to the countryside does really help, the scenes are just fabulous out there. ^^

Oh, ever tried commenting about the cost of electricity to that well-lit neighbor? Those floodlights surely munch plenty of kilowatts... =)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Actually, if you can find Ursa Minor, you should be able to locate the comet. Following the line made by the two end stars of the "handle" (or bear's tail) in a line through the pole star and onward, points right at the comet if you go far enough. Have a look at the chart at Spaceweather.com, print it out if necessary. It makes it pretty easy.

The cost is no object to the crazy lady next door. She spends money freely when she feels like it. I don't know where it comes from or if she just has a lot of credit cards, but I know the cost of gasoline or electricity is no concern to her. Nor is the environmental impact, judging by her copious use of pesticides and the amount of trash she discards every week. We normally have about half of a 40 gallon container for two adults and a lot of animals. She usually puts out SEVEN containers of the same size, overflowing, with additional stuff in plastic bags. I have been puzzling for years trying to figure out what she could possibly use in such huge quantities that she has so much trash.

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

Ah, good point, never thought of that. Had to install Stellarium for that too, got too curious. =)

I guess your neighbor is spending all her money on electricity and dog food then. Sometimes people get a bit skewed on their priorities, I've noticed.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

Before I was done locating and examining the comet, wham, on comes another million-watt floodlight right in my face.

Tell her not to spy on your property in the middle of the night. :-P
Tell her that if there are any "intruders" on your property, that is your problem, not hers.

That really sucks. :-/ If that were me in your position, I'd be considering building a wall along that side, even if it had to be taller than a house. Though in practical terms, I'd be thinking of moving somewhere with a larger more isolated field surrounded by forest.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Believe me, I've had both thoughts. In practical terms, though, either choice is really too expensive to consider.

She isn't actually pointing her lights at me, it just seems that way because they are so huge and bright. And the fact is, her mindset is so bent in one direction, like the home owners' association president in Over the Hedge, that no amount of explaining or arguing will get through to her. We had a much more serious dispute with her over her use of ChemLawn to spray her grass for "weeds." She was having them cover an additional five feet or so on our side of the fence (and paying extra for it) to keep our "weeds" from getting into her lawn. Even when we pointed out that our horses and sheep eat that grass and we don't want them eating her chemicals, she didn't care. Fortunately, she has stopped paying for ChemLawn service, probably because they left tiretread marks on her patio or something.

The Chaos-makers Union

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

I've often considered writing a post about such people- in fact, a story I'm working on talks about just such a person. I call them "Chaos Makers"... their only contribution to this world is the general disorder they insist on broadcasting in every direction as far as possible. I'm listening to the hyper-repetetive music of one right now. It's easier to memorize song lyrics when it's one sentence of incorrect grammar repeated close to a dozen times per verse.

Re: The Chaos-makers Union

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm sure Jan thinks she's creating order rather than promoting chaos. The problem with that is that it is all in equalibrium. So increasing the order in one place must be compensated by increased chaos elsewhere. Or something.

Re: The Chaos-makers Union

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

I'm impressed, Alt! Well said. Why is it those who seek to create odrer do the exact opposite? From the ambulance that causes accidents to the social worker who splits families apart- this is the Chaos Makers Union. The road is paved with good intentions... that road was once a beautiful field of wildflowers.

Re: The Chaos-makers Union

[altivo.livejournal.com]

that road was once a beautiful field of wildflowers

Precisely. But to people like Jan, those aren't flowers, they are weeds. I believe it's a form of what Freudian psychologists call "anal retention."

They can't answer the question "why" for their behavior. They are simply compelled to do what they do. They can't imagine doing anything else, and in fact the suggestion that they do something else is the only way to scare the shit out of them, so to speak.

Re: The Chaos-makers Union

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

They can't answer "why" because they don't want to look at or share what their motivations are... fear perhaps, if not genuine ignorance.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

I live right next to a mountain so I can drive over it and see the night sky, but you'll probably hate me for this, I go up to the top of the lookout on one of the other mountains nearby and watch the city lights.

As for the lady next door, I pity her, she must have issues plus a large power bill.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I think she has a lot of issues, yes.

Unlike the last bright comet, which was mostly visible to you guys down there and not to us, I think this one may be too far north for you to see. But there are good photos on Spaceweather.com.