Chris Lintott’s Universe

I’ve been joking for years about the Sky at Night curse that makes everything interesting happen between filming and broadcast. We finished an excellent interview with Derek Ward Thompson and Carlos Frenk today about one, had lunch and headed back to Oxford. I then opened my email to find news of a bright comet…

It’s Comet Holmes, and it should be at magnitude 17 (ie very faint). Spanish amateurs reported it as magnitude 10 last night, and reports from Japan say it’s now magnitude 3 – visible to the naked eye as a star, in the constellation of Perseus. Patrick tells me it’s notoriously unpredictable, so go outside, look at Perseus and see if there’s anything odd going on.