Comet may put on a celestial show
Any day now, the best show in town may be appearing in a night
sky near you.
I’m loathe to oversell the arrival of a comet after the
less-than-spectacular-but-much-ballyhooed Hale Bopp spectacle in
1997, but we just may be treated to a pretty cool celestial show
before the end of February.
Comet may put on a celestial show
Any day now, the best show in town may be appearing in a night sky near you.
I’m loathe to oversell the arrival of a comet after the less-than-spectacular-but-much-ballyhooed Hale Bopp spectacle in 1997, but we just may be treated to a pretty cool celestial show before the end of February.
Dave Baumgartner of Hollister is an amateur astronomer with a small observatory outside his home. Queried about the comet, Baumgartner produced news of Comet Machholz, which was most visible in January, glowing bright green near Pleiades and Perseus.
But that’s not the comet I was calling him about.
Another friend sent me notice of the approach of Comet Lulin, a ball of cosmic debris that reportedly also glows bright green. Some people predict that it will be visible to the naked eye around Feb. 24. That’s when Lulin is expected to pass closest to earth, appearing near the planet Saturn and the constellation Libra.
“There’s a number of them out there,” Baumgartner said. “This one here is huge.”
Comet Lulin was discovered by a young meteorology student in China, Quanzhi Ye.
In July 2007, Ye was staring at a black-and-white photo of a star field taken a few nights earlier by Taiwanese astronomer Chi Sheng Lin at the Lulin Observatory. It was Ye who picked something different out of the photo – Comet Lulin.
The comet’s green color comes from the gases that make up its atmosphere, cyanogens and diatomic carbon, both of which glow green in a vacuum.
Odds are that Comet Lulin will only be visible in the darkest of skies, and your best bet is to seek it out in the southern sky at about 3 a.m. Feb. 24. But since this is believed to be the comet’s first trip to this solar system, it’s hard to predict how visible it will be as it approaches the sun, according to NASA scientists.
There’s also the weather. It is winter, after all.
“Unfortunately with the skies the way they are now, one guy said to me
‘when its cloudy you mean you can’t see anything?’ I didn’t know how to answer it,” Baumgartner said.
The vastness of space makes the term “close approach” relatively meaningless. Lulin will get no closer than 38 million miles short of Earth.
In 1997, our family packed up a load of gear and headed to Fremont Peak during one of the monthly star parties that occur there.
As the sky grew dark, the place filled with people and their foreign looking equipment. They were generous in sharing looks at the heavens. We attended a program at the small observatory near the peak and eventually settled into bed.
In the middle of the night, we were roused by one of our neighbors, who had his scope trained on Hale Bopp. We were given the gift of a great view of the comet, twin tails streaming away from it.
We could not have known at the time that a 7-year-old boy in China had peered through a small telescope and seen the same comet, igniting a passion that led more than a decade later to a discovery of his own.
