October 24th, 2007
Sky at Night Curse
Posted by
chrislintott in
Uncategorized
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.
on October 24th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
I see your Sky at Night curse and raise you an English weather curse.
on October 25th, 2007 at 8:18 am
[...] Chris Lintott is reporting on his blog on Comet Holmew, which ought to be a magnitude 17 object but recently clocked in at mag 10 and then mag 3, making it a naked-eye visible comet (even from Cardiff if you’re lucky). [...]
on October 27th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Hi Chris,
I managed to pick up 17P/Holmes through fairly substantial cloud last night (26 Oct). After a bit of a battle identifying the area (it’s not easy to astro-navigate with just the Moon visible!) I managed to lock onto the comet. For all the world it looks like a defocused star - most odd. It’s quite large and pretty bright by comet standards. I’ve seen various descriptions of it as looking like a yellow nebula and they are pretty much spot on. A cloud filtered UK image can be seen here:
http://www.digitalsky.org.uk/comets/2007-10-26_Comet-Holmes_800.jpg
Let’s hope the UK’s night sky clarity improves next week - it can’t get much worse!
on September 30th, 2008 at 6:18 am
[...] preview of the mission with Martin Barstow last weekend, so I’m chalking this one up to the Sky at Night [...]