Updates and Images...

MAY 10th – INTERMISSION…

We’re now halfway through the eagerly-anticipated astronomy blockbuster “2013 – Year of The Comets”. Comet PANSTARRS has been and gone, and Comet ISON is still months away from doing anything really interesting. So, time to catch our breath, wriggle out of our seats and stretch our legs, and after a quick visit to the loo grab an ice cream in the lobby, and look back at what happened in Part 1, and wonder what Part 2 will bring…

PANSTARRS… oh you little tease, you. When you were discovered you promised us so much, but you didn’t deliver, not really. You were still a very pretty comet, in your own right, and if you’d come from nowhere we would have been a lot more appreciative, but when you first showed yourself and told us how gorgeous you were going to be we took you at your word. That’s our fault, I’ll admit. We read your email and got rather carried away. I think it was because we haven’t had a good northern sky comet since Hale-Bopp. After drooling over all those lovely, lovely images ogf Comet Lovejoy and Comet McNaught taken by our friends Down Under, we were starved and desperate. We wanted you to be impressive and amazing SO badly we went a bit comet crazy, and built you up into something amazing before you knocked on the door. So, no Hale-Bopp 2, no great glowing tail, nothing like that. But you were very pretty, with your fan tail and your close encounter with M31, and you gave us all a lot of much-needed and very useful comet-watching and -photography practice. And I had some very enjoyable mornings and evenings in your company, so I won’t think badly of you in the years and decades ahead. The northern nights are bright now, and you are so faint, lost among the peppercorn and pollen stars of Spring that I don’t believe I’ll see you again, so farewell PANSTARRS, and thank you. I won’t curse your name, as I fear some will.

And now, we wait. We wait for ISON.

As I write this, on a damp, windy and cold May 10th in Kendal, Comet ISON is still an enigma. We know where it is, we know where it will be in the weeks and months ahead, but we don’t know how bright it will get after it has rounded the Sun on Nov 28th. We can’t know that yet. ISON is still so far from the Sun, so deep in the depths of space, that it won’t “turn on” properly for months yet. That’s not to say that it isn’t doing anything. The recent photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope show a lot of activity already – the comet has a respectable tail, and there is structure within its coma, structure suggesting jets of gas and dust are shooting off the nucleus already. This is a very promising sign, but others are raising concerns about ISON’s brightness, or lack of brightness. Looking at brightness estimates made over the past month it’s tempting to believe that it is underperforming, that it is not following the predicted curve of brightness and might even be fading…

…but it’s not as simple as that. This far from the Sun Comet ISON’s behaviour simply can’t be predicted. Many people forget that all this fuss and hype, all this speculation and prediction is focussed on a big chunk of dirty ice that we still can’t see clearly, so we shouldn’t be too surprised if it doesn’t follow our predictions and expectations perfectly. There may be cause for concern, there may not be, we just don’t know. At the end of the day, ISON will do whatever it does, it’s as simple as that, and we’ll have to make the most of whatever it offers us later this year. It may unfurl a magnificent medieval banner of a tail and reduce even hardened and cynical comet observers and experts (and boy, there are a LOT of those!!!) to tears of joy, or it may just put on a modest show that the general public don’t really notice. As I keep saying, we’ll have to wait and see.

But observations of Comet ISON – amateur and professional – are ongoing and bringing results. Go to the “Realtime Comet Gallery” on Spaceweather.com and you’ll see lots of amateurs (admittedly with whopping big telescopes!) are now imaging ISON, and professionals are studying it too, and are getting very interesting results. You’ll recall (if you’re a regular visitor) that we recently email interviewed astronomer Nick Howes. Just yesterday he posted online an image his team has taken with a 2m telescope, and it hints at “something” within the coma, some feature, which may or not (MY interpretation, not Nick’s!) be a jet or a plume or something coming off the nucleus…

Nick has Tweeted that his team is planning a lot more observations of ISON, with numerous instruments, and they hope to have a better idea soon of what that ‘thing’ actually is. Until then, like us, they’ll just have to wait. If it is a plume or a jet of material shooting out of the nucleus it might be a sign that the comet is waking up a little, which would be good, and might herald the start of real activity. Or it might not. It might be a sign that one of that fleet of alien spacecraft which is, if you believe what the web’s nutters and idiots and fruit loops are saying, apparently following ISON, has crashed into the nucleus. Yeah, that’ll be it… Unbelievable the utter garbage people are spouting about this comet, as if the wonders of the universe need decorating even more…

So, all we can do now – all of us – is wait, and I guess crossing our fingers can’t hurt! I’ve been wondering what ISON might look like later in the year (I have to, I give lots of public talks about astronomy and am getting a LOT of questions about it now) and decided to make some pictures showing what we might see in our sky later this year, but ONLY FOR FUN, and to have something to show in my talks. I’m not claiming the images are ACCURATE or SCIENTIFIC PREDICTIONS, they’re just, I suppose, what I’m hoping we’ll see after ISON rounds the Sun in early December. I expect to get some flak from certain people for creating these images, but they need to lighten up a bit, and maybe make their OWN pictures of they want there to be something more realistic or more accurate “out there” for people to see.

Here’s what I’m hoping I’ll see, looking NW from Kendal Castle, by early December…

…but I fully acknowledge – and want everyone reading this to understand – that ISON might actually look more like this…

We’ll have to wait and see!

What about the view from other parts of Cumbria? Well, my fingers, toes, eyes and ears are crossed that I might see something like this if I head north to Castlerigg Stone Circle near Keswick…

From Crow Park in Keswick, on the shore of beautiful Derwentwater, will we see this, I wonder..?

Moving towards the coast, wouldn’t it be wonderful to stand on the harbour-side at Whitehaven and see this…

…or even this…

That’s possible, but I freely admit it’s not likely, and I trust you, the good readers of and visitors to this blog, realise that I am NOT PREDICTING THIS IS WHAT ISON WILL LOOK LIKE. I’m just being an optimist. But hey, I’m allowed to be, it’s my blog, and I’ve littered it with so many disclaimers and warnings and modifiers that only a complete and utter numptie would take these images as actual *predictions*.

Closer to home, I would love to see ISON looking like this as I stroll along the shore at Arnside with Stella, eating our scampi and chips before setting up our cameras…

Now come on, that’s not too much to ask for is it? That’s not being unrealistic?

Well, it might be, yes, that’s the truth. Comet ISON may yet disappoint us all and fizzle out cruelly. Or it might just not survive its FAST AND FURIOUS wheel-spinning, rubber-burning handbrake turn around the Sun, and emerge as a trail of debris which looks nothing like a comet at all. We can’t know that yet.

What DO we know? Well, we know the following…

As for the “other stuff”- you know, the rubbish being spouted by people on the internet, in their stupid shaky-camera YouTube videos, well, just to be perfectly clear…

I trust that makes my position clear on this…

So… PANSTARRS has gone (or just about), and my own first look at ISON is probably months away. But more and more telescopes, cameras and eyes around the world are turning towards it, so there’s going to be lots to report on. I hope you’ll come back here and follow ISON’s slow cruise towards the Sun with me and other comet observers.

 

—————————————————————————————————————-

 

 

APRIL 28th 2013 – Catching Up…

As you can see from the date here, it’s been more than a month since I’ve updated this “Updates” part of my blog. Why? Well, mostly because I’ve been so busy trying to see, photograph and write about Comet PANSTARRS! It’s just about gone now, a binocular object in the constellation of Cassiopeia, a little fainter each night, but far from being disappointed by it, as many other comet watchers and bloggers have been, I have very fond memories of PANSTARRS. It was a challenge to see – okay, it was an absolute pig to see! – because of its low magnitude and the godawful British weather, but I had some very enjoyable views of it, both alone and with great company, and it was my first “digital comet” – the first comet I was able to take half-decent photos of with a half-decent digital SLR. Observing and photographing PANSTARRS taight me a lot about observing and photographing comets in general, and as it sails off into the great dark I will look back on our brief time together with a lot of happiness and gratitude.

But…

Looming on our astronomical horizon is, of course, Comet ISON. What’s the latest?

Well, it depends on where you go to *read* “the latest”. Some people are convinced ISON is going to be another Kohoutek, because it has been behind its predicted brightness. Others – like myself – are urging caution, and prefer to WAIT AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS!!!! We don’t know yet how ISON will perform before, as and after it rounds the Sun at the end of November because it’s nowhere **** NEAR the Sun yet! Yes, it might fizzle and fade away, but it might be a fantastic object, as impressive as we’re all hoping. But we don;t know yet, and we CAN’T know yet, so I wish the doom squad would stop bringing everyone down and just hit the “Pause” button until things are clearer. In a couple of months we’ll have a much better idea of what’s going to happen at year’s end. THEN we can star worrying, or celebrating.

Meanwhile, the comet has continued to brighten, slowly, yes, but surely, and is now becoming visible in – and photographed through – larger amateur telescopes. It has a small but obvious tail, and is a classic “faint fuzzy” comet in pictures being taken by amateurs around the world. If you want to see some of those images, just go to the always brilliant Spaceweather.com website and click on the link to the “Realtime Comet Gallery”. Lots of ISON images there.

But it’s not just amateurs who are photographing ISON now. Recently the Hubble Space Telescope took an image of the comet, and that was splashed all over the internet. I’ll be amazed if you haven’t seen it already, but just in case you haven’t – or if you have, and want to enjoy drooling over it again – here it is…

Oooh, how pretty is that?! Comet ISON isn’t actually that beautiful blue colour of course; the blue tint was added by the Hubble team “to bring out subtle details in the comet’s structure”. Yeah, right. They did that to make it look pretty, didn’t they?

The full story behind that image can be found here…

Hubble photographs Comet ISON

…and it contains a very interesting snippet of information. At the moment, the comet’s coma – the cloud of gas surrounding its nucleus – is 1.2x as wide as Australia. As AUSTRALIA!! So, if the nucleus really is around 4km wide, that means something a little larger than one of Australia’s most famous landmarks, Uluru (used to be known as Ayers Rock) is now surrounded by a cloud of gas larger than the continent itself…

Very cool!

The Hubble team did some more processing on their image, and it really does bring out details…

Now that’s interesting… that image clearly shows that although ISON is only a small comet (as I said above, current estimates suggest it is only 4km across, we thought it was bigger at one time) it is already very active. The tail is well developed, and there’s a jet of material shooting out of the sunward face of the comet which is putting out a *lot* of material. What does this mean for ISON’s prospects? No idea. And I don’t think the comet experts can tell yet, either. Maybe it’s a good thing, in that it shows ISON is a very active comet, with a lot of  “stuff” to come off and out of it, thus making it brighter in the sky later in the year..? Or maybe it’s a bad thing, and the comet is peaking too soon, meaning it will run out of “stuff” before it rounds the Sun, making it fainter in the sky..? No idea. Just no idea. We have to wait and see. Every comet is different, we can’t predict the future behaviour of ISON based on the past behaviour of other comets, we just can’t do that (though it would be very handy if we could!). All we can do for now is look at images like this and cross our fingers that, come November and December, we see something truly memorable in the sky which we will be excited and inspired by.

The other development with Comet ISON is that, inevitably, the internet is now groaning under the weight of absolute nutters, fruit loops and headcases predicting – well, predicting all sorts of things, all of them utter bull. Some are predicting ISON will bring death and destruction to Earth, showering us with cosmic debris as it rounds the Sun. Others are predicting ISON will trigger earthquakes and tidal waves. Still others are proclaiming that ISON is “a sign from God” and will herald the apocalypse… If it wasn’t so infuriating it would be sad. I honestly wish someone would invent a computer virus which would sweep through the internet *like* a bloody tsunami, smashing up and carrying away the shattered debris of every stupid, deluded, nut job website, blog and YouTube channel which is putting out this crap. One of my “favourites” – and I’m not going to name them, because that’s just giving them publicity – is posting regular YouTube clips on their channel filled with so much utter, utter rubbish that it’s quite staggering. It must actually take a great degree of dedication and commitment to write and record clip after clip after clip of total s**t like that, it really must.

The common theme running through these blogs, websites and YouTube films is a distrust of authority in general, and scientists in particular. That’s nothing new, of course; many people still insist on spouting that “We never went to the Moon! It was all a hoax!” crap, even though their temple-tapping craziness has been exposed countles times for what it is. What I can’t get my head around – and what really annoys me, to be honest – is how these people rant on about how the scientists are wrong, or lying, when their whole lives are made possible BY science and scientists. How can people who use computers, mobile phones, the internet, TV, etc, all things that came FROM science and technology, suddenly say that science and scientists can’t be trusted?

And NASA is hiding the facts about ISON is it? That would be hiding them by posting pictures on the internet for anyone and everyone to look at, and work with, right?

And the Governments of the world “know the truth” about ISON but are hiding it from us? Ah, these would be the Governments of the world which can’t keep ANYTHING secret, right? The Governments of the world that regularly have their financial mistakes, sex scandals and worse revealed by investigative journalists?

Although many people want to speak out about this, they don’t because they worry about the response they’ll get. Well, it’s time someone said something to these cyber clowns. I have a message for all the people – and I know many of them will read this, because WordPress tells me who is reading and linking to my blog – who are putting out all this stuff, all the “The End Is Nigh”/NASA is hiding the truth from us/This is God’s Judgement crap:

Either take the time to educate yourselves about basic astronomy, about what comets actually are, and can do, and how they behave, or shut the **** up, because you’re embarrassing yourselves, people are laughing at you and your stoopidity. But worse, you’re worrying, even scaring, a lot of people who think that because you’re intelligent enough to have a blog, or website, or YouTube channel, you know what you’re talking about. You don’t. Actually, I suspect many of you KNOW you don’t, and you’re just jumping on the ISON End Is Nigh bandwagon because it makes you feel part of some big secret. Stop it. Stop it now. You’re making fools of yourselves. Because when ISON sails past, leaving behind nothing but millions of people with smiles on their faces, memory cards full of beautiful photos, and great memories of having seen something lovely in the night sky, you’ll forget all about ISON and start ranting on about something else “out there” heralding the end of mankind, as you always do. 

And I have another message, this time for anyone who has read any of those blogs or websites, or seen any of those YouTube posts, and been worried by what they read, heard or saw:

Don’t be worried, they’re talking rubbish, sheer rubbish. These are, remember, the same people who predicted the world would end in 2012 – you know, that whole Mayan thing – and we’re still here. Ah, they don’t mention that now, do they? No, don’t worry. Stick to blogs like this one, or the others out there, which will just tell you the truth and make sure you know when and where to look for ISON, rather than fill your heads with BS about pressure waves, tsunamis, comet impacts and “The Red Hand of Death”, and you’ll be fine.

Have I got time for a third and final message? Good.

Oi! Newspaper reporters! TV reporters! Web journalists! Will you please, PLEASE, stop parroting the “Comet might be brighter in the night sky than the Full Moon!!!” rubbish?!?!?!? It won’t be!!! We’ve been telling you for MONTHS that it won’t be, but you keep on repeating it, over and over, just lazily cutting it out of someone else’s old, outdated report and pasting it into your own. STOP it!

Ok, I’ve got that out of my system now. Thanks for listening. I’m going for a lie down in a dark room..

I hope you’ll keep checking back here for updates about ISON.

MARCH 7th 2013

A brief interruption…

Typical. Just as Comet PANSTARRS swings up into the northern sky I won’t be able to update the blog for a few days, so I’ll probably miss reporting on the first northern hemisphere sightings of the comet! Never mind, normal service will be resumed on Monday, when I hope to see PANSTARRS for the first time myself! In the meantime, to keep up to date with northern developments, please follow the following people on Twitter, if you can…

Daniel Fischer  @cosmos4u

Nick Howes @NickAstronomer

for regular updates and links to sites which will be following the northern apparition, and keep an eye on the following websites…

Spaceweather.com

universetoday.com

for images and observing reports as they come in.

Good luck everyone!!

FEBRUARY 27th 2013

Interview with astronomer and comet expert Nick Howes.

…and now for something completely different!

If you’re following comets PANSTARRS and ISON on Twitter or Facebook – and if you’re not you really should be, because as well as a huge number of nutter-written websites and blogs ranting and raving about the imminent end of the world etc, there are many extremely educational, informative and useful sites written by people fascinated by and passionate about comets – then you’ll already know who Nick Howes is.

He’s one of the hardest-working “social media astronomers” on the internet, followed by thousands of people on both sites, and his posts and Tweets are an invaluable source of accurate and reliable information about what’s happening “out there” with PANSTARRS and ISON. He regularly posts images he’s taken of comets using some of the world’s major telescopes. And as if that wasn’t enough to earn him a superhero cape, he’s a huge champion of Outreach and Education too!

So OBVIOUSLY when I was wondering “Who can I ask some *serious* questions about PANSTARRS and ISON?” I thought of him…

One Twitter DM later and Nick had generously agreed to take some time out of his increasingly busy schedule to talk to this blog. So, grab yourself a coffee, and settle down for a chat with one of the professional astronomers who’s not only observing these comets as a scientist, but as an enthusiast too…

——————————————————————————————————-

Nick,  thanks for talking to us, especially when you’re so busy. Firstly,  can you explain briefly what you do in relation to comet – hunting and observing?

My role with the Faulkes Telescope project is to set up and work on professional-amateur collaborations. Working with observatories such as the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, we have used the 2m Faulkes scopes to help them with their LARI project aiming to improve the orbits of trans Neptunian objects. The slow movement of these means it’s a perfect project to engage schools with, as they can also help with astrometry (learning the art and science behind how objects move and how to measure this for non critical targets (i.e. ones we don’t have to file data on quickly , unlike say a new comet)). We’re also working a a ground support telescope for the ESA Rosetta mission, where we’ll be monitoring comet 67P throughout its observable passage through the solar system over the coming few years. 

 

This will be to provide astrometry and photometry for observation programs (managed by NASA so well on the EPOXI mission with their AOP project), and also as we have so much telescope time (which is difficult for professional observatories with large instruments to get a lot of the time) on the almost Hubble sized Faulkes scopes, we’ll be able to provide very high resolution data on the dust and gas levels coming off the comet, which will feed in to our own research papers with the CARA (Italian Comet Research group) of which I am a member.

 

My own smaller team of Ernesto Guido and I along with colleagues in Italy at the Remanzacco observatory also monitor a wide range of comets and asteroid bodies in the solar system, looking for evidence of any unusual behaviour (again for a long term study) such as fragmentation and outburst type events.

Can you tell us something about the equipment you use –  the telescopes, cameras etc? 

At home I have a C11 Celestron,  a TMB105 refractor and several other smaller refractors and solar H-Alpha and Calcium K line telescopes. I use the C11 for occasional high resolution deep sky work, and the solar scopes for imaging the Sun of course. The TMB though is my workhorse. It’s a superb wide field telescope, ideal for imaging nebula and galaxies (which I enjoy for aesthetic reasons), but also for tracking comets and asteroids on a wider field basis. CCD’s I use the Atik 4000 CCD and the Atik 314L CCD for deep sky and spectroscopy work, and the Lumenera Skynyx 2-1 and 2-0 cameras for planetary, solar and lunar imaging.

Tell us about a couple of the comets you’ve observed in the past… Any famous names we might recognise? 

I was one of the people who detected the fragmentation of Comet C/2007 Q3 Sidiing Spring which made the BBC and Discovery Science (plus a ton of other) news and media outlets. We’re on the discovery MPEC (Minor Planet Electronic circular) for dozens of new comets such as ISON, and one of the latest ones by Jim Scotti in Arizona, which we helped detect during the last BBC Stargazing Live TV show, and which got announced live on air by Professor Cox. We’re observing ISON regularly, as well as Comet C/2011 L4 Panstarrs, and last year we showed some of the last post fragmentation images of Comet Elenin. Soon we’ll be ramping up our campaign on comet 67P (for the Rosetta mission). Last year we attempted a very tricky acquisition of Comet Hale Bopp out at a record breaking distance, but only managed to get one night of suitably good seeing, where we believe we imaged the comet, but without a second night, we could not officially claim it.

Everyone’s getting very excited about Comet ISON and we’ll come to that. What about PANSTARRS? It seems to be waking up again after dozing off for a while. What are your impressions of the comet at the moment? 

It’s underperforming against the original expectations. It’s a shame that so much hype in the press went in to both Panstarrs and ISON. Panstarrs is looking like a nice comet in the making, with the tail getting steadily bigger, but it will be very low down for UK observers, and whilst it will be naked eye visible, right now (and this could still change!), it’s below the magnitude we all initially hoped for.

Always dangerous making predictions, I  know, but are you more or less optimistic now about the comet’s appearance once it sweeps up into the northern sky? And why? 

A little less, but for dedicated comet observers, it will still be a nice comet. The recent observations from observers further south have been more encouraging that the data was showing only a few weeks ago.

Clearly PANSTARRS is going to be ‘challenging’  to see from the north, thanks to its low altitude in a bright twilight sky, but still worth trying, right? 

Yes, but caution is needed. This will be a near horizon and one should wait for the Sun to be well out of the way in the early evening. The latest observations in the south are showing it with a nice tail and around mag 4 and decreasing (getting brighter)… so yes, absolutely worth a go… Binoculars (with caution noting the Sun comment) and wide field refractors will be great for this one if you have a clear view of the horizon.

You’ve just released a new image of comet ISON, which shows a faint, stubby tail. Tell us a little about what we can see on the picture, and how it was taken...

Taken with the 2m Liverpool Telescope on La Palma which I use on a research program being conducted by my team and the CARA group in support of the NASA and ESA missions as well as for Afrho (Dust/Continuum) measurements. It was taken using a robotic scheduling system where I get the coordinate data from the JPL Horizons website in a format determined by the software on the telescope. As the scope has 0.3 arcsecond/pixel (in the binned mode we use) capabiity, we always set the exposure times so that we get sharp images (no trailing) on the comet. We could in theory track non sidereally on the comet itself, but this method works well. We then slew the telescope to known and nearby reference stars, which gives us the reference data needed to get the measurements in our Afrho software. We generally use the SDSS or Bessel R band filter as this not only is near to the peak response on the CCD’s on the telescopes, but also a good way to help with seeing and light.moon light pollution, So the images are almost always mono and not “pretty”, but we get great science from them.

To a non – astronomer it doesn’t look that impressive, but it’s obviously got you excited! Why? 

To answer this and your last question, what’s great for us, is that this is a first time comet, which is predicted to be very bright. Seeing a tail at over 4AU is great as it means the comet is now already quite active (the tail is measured at over 65000 km in length and growing). It’s also enabling us to use algorithms to look at the tail jet struture already (albeit in less detail then when it will be closer) and from that look at how the comet is evolving and things like the rotation rate.

Prediction time again –  is ISON the real deal, is it going to be be the one we remember for the rest of our lives, or could it yet fizzle and leave us all shaking our fists at it as it heads back out into deep space at year’s end? 

To quote the great David Levy “Comets are like cats…they have tails and are unpredictable” We saw some wild predictions for ISON which made the press, all of which were amusing at best and total rubbish at worst. ISON, if it makes it round the Sun, will hopefully prove to be a dramatic sight, possibly for a very short time, reaching very high negative magnitude values, (but also close to the Sun at this time). We (our Remanzacco team) have been more conservative than some estimations (some reaching staggering mag -15 + predictions) at around mag -7 to -8, and that’s IF it makes iit in at all. Lots of comets fragment, for various reasons. It’s got a close approach to Mars coming up (which to my mind if MSL images it from the surface will provide us with the image of the decade so far). IF and it’s a big IF it makes it and does perform flawlessly, then we are in for a visual treat… but…for my team, already it’s exciting, and as with other comets, we’re tracking it now as often as we can with big telescopes in the hope that something does happen, be that an outburst or even fragmentation…

Where will you be when ISON is making its Fast and Furious screaming flyby of the Sun? 

 

I hope to be somewhere in the Arizona desert, where I was lucky enough to spend time with some great friends for the Venus transit. The light pollution is minimal, and the viewing opportunities are superb. If she does “blow” then some great observatories there will be one of the prime places to witness this amazing event.

Obviously the world’s largest telescopes will be trained on both these comets, but do you think there’s still a role for the amateur to play at times like this? Can they contribute, even if they’re not particularly skilled or experienced observers? 

 

Absolutely. Even only this week I was contacted by a NASA/Naval Labs team who are setting up an ISON monitoring project similar to the NASA EPOXI Amateir observers program. Amateurs have unlimited scope time, can reach altitudes closer to the horizon than many professional scopes can attempt, and with good methodologies and good scientific understanding, can provide superb data (albeit at a lower resolution) in to observing programs. My data both from the home setup and Faulkes has made it in to papers I am a co-author on in prestigious science journals such as Icarus and the Astrophysical Journal.

We’re all crossing our fingers for good shows from these comets, but it seems like we’re long overdue for a truly,  truly Great Comet that dominates the whole sky, like those seen in the past. If you could jump in the TARDIS and go back I  time to see one,  which would it be, and why?

I think the great comet of 1843. This was a period of great scientific discovery, with Fox Talbot’s pioneering work on the positive negative film process, with the like of John Herschel. Could you imagine being the first person to photograph a comet, as they could have, and to be stood with such giants of science doing so?

Finally, what’s next for you, when PANSTARRS and ISON have left the stage and things get ‘back to normal’? Any big projects on your horizon? 

Yes, 67P is the big one for our team. I’ve been a science writer for ESA for about 18 months, and have met and worked with some of the Rosetta team on other projects, such as the ESA Near Earth Object detection programs. To be able to provide ground based support for what promises to be one of the most challenging and exciting missions in history is a real thrill, but who knows, new comets are coming along all the time, finding one of our own is always the goal, and we keep looking, but being on so many discovery MPECS (myself and Ernesto between us have over 2000 NASA ADS citations), and providing good science to Lowell, ESA’s SSA program and others, will keep us all very busy for many years to come.

Thanks for talking to us Nick!

FEBRUARY 17th 2013

Two comets in one fantastic picture!

I must admit I’ve been getting a bit pessimistic about Comet PANSTARRS. One forum post after another, one Facebook update after another, one blog after another has reported how it’s fainter than predicted, how it’s going to be much harder to see than we had all been hoping, how it might even be lost in the twilight completely come March. Not good.

But this morning, my faith has been restored! I’m a Believer again! Well, ok, I’m not so pessimistic as I was yesterday, put it that way. Why? Because I woke up this morning and there, on Facebook, was an image that had my jaw heading for the floor. Taken by southern hemisphere amateur astronomer and astrophotographer Justin Tilbrook, and originally posted on the brilliant “Ice in Space” forum, it shows two comets on the one frame, shining serenely close together amongst the stars of the southern sky. Here it is…

I know what you’re thinking – where are the comets?! Let me show you…

Comet LEMMON has been delighting southern hemisphere observers for a while now. It’s over-performed a little, developing a lovely little tail and a greenish hue, and is now a good naked eye object. But it’s the view of Comet PANSTARRS down near the horizon there that has renewed my hope. It’s clearly got a nice V-shape, with real structure, and is probably naked eye brightness by now too. That suggests that when it sails up into our northern sky it *will* be visible against the twilight, and will be well worth looking at through binoculars and small telescopes…

Great shot Justin!

FEBRUARY 11th 2013

Terry Lovejoy’s PANSTARRS image…

I cheekily asked Terry Lovejoy to tell us a bit more about his latest image of Comet PANSTARRS, and he very graciously sent me back this…

“This image of Comet C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) was made Feb 9.7 and shows 2 distinct tails. The brighter and curved tail extends over 0.5 of degree and the longer straight tail extends to the edge of the image for a length of nearly 2 degrees. The telescope used was a Celestron C8 “Hyperstar” with a QHY-9 cooled monochrome camera. At the time the comet was easily visible in binoculars at magnitude 5.5.

“Re comet’s brightness : The current brightening trend suggests a magnitude 3 at peak (but it will be difficult to find being so close to the sun in the sky) and will be around mag 4 when it is more generally visible in the later part of March. The brightening trend is actually pretty typical of comets in general – they hardly ever brighten as fast as the predictions (so why are such optimistic predictions posted – that is a very good question!!).”

Thanks Terry!

FEBRUARY 11th 2013

…and the countdown to the first “The End Is Nigh!!” howling, tin foil hat-wearing, basement-dwelling, X-Files obsessed, wild-haired, conspiracy theory loving nutter declaring that the Pope’s resignation is a sign from above that that appearance of Comet ISON is going to herald the End Of The World begins… (checks watch)… NOW… 

FEBRUARY 10th 2013

Comet ISON might still be a stupid distance away from us, and we might still be 6 months away from our first naked eye sightings of it, but it is now being imaged regularly by amateur astronomers all across the world, including some with quite modest equipment. The key word there though is *imaged*. It’s showing up on long exposure photographs, as a teeny tiny blurry smudgy spot, but there are fewer visual observations coming in I think it’s fair to say. But still, the fact that ISON is being imaged when it’s this far from the un, and indeed is already growing a hint of a tail, bodes well for its Sungrazing fly-by in November.

Here’s an image taken by Doug Ellison, an amazing friend of mine who founded the legendary Unmannedspaceflight.com forum and who now works for NASA, at JPL in California. Doug isn’t an astronomer, amateur or professional, and he doesn’t have a telescope, but he is an absolute technical and web genius (he’ll be embarrassed by me saying that but it’s true) and without a telescope of his own has managed to take some images of ISON! HOW?!?! Well, he used one of  the network of  iTelescopes, which can be operated online. I’ll let Doug explain…

“I’m using iTelescope to hopefully learn enough to image Juno (spaceprobe – SA) during its flyby in October.  I figure this makes a nice bit of practice for moving objects

“Cometary imaging advice I found suggested using a V-band filter. So that’s what I did… 5 images each of 5 minutes exposure.  All stacked in Photoshop and then the first and last images flicked back and forth to track down the fuzzy little swine….took a while to find it!“

…but find it he did, and here’s Doug’s gif animation showing Comet ISON, centre, moving through the starfield…

Woo hoo! That’s it! That’s our comet! Nice work Doug.

And this morning, Rolando Ligustri, one of the members of the Yahoo Comets-ml group posted a colour image of ISON… click to enlarge…

Here’s a crop of the comet itself…

Just a little teardrop smudge, a tiny misty tadpole lost amongst the stars, but oh it could turn into something special, couldn’t it?

I’ve been thinking about when I might get my first glimpse of ISON myself, and I reckon that I should see it in August with my telescope, my trusty 4.5″ reflector. That ‘scope has served me well for many years now, and has shown me many of the wonders of the universe. But although it is very portable, and packs down into two holdalls, it’s not exactly light, and it does take a while to put up, so I decided to look for another telescope to use, something I could have ready to pick up and grab  and head out with if a break suddenly appears in the Cumbrian cloud, offering me a chance to look at the comet later in the year. I wanted something smaller and lighter, something I could take up to Kendal Castle – my prime observing location – and be observing with within minutes. Something like this perhaps…

…but then I decided to go down the “spotting scope” route, so I trekked around Kendal, looking in all the usual suspect shops, laughing nervously and uncomfortably at the prices before backing out of the shop and running away quickly. Then I decided to look in the local “Cash In A Dash” shop – kind of a modern day pawn shop, every town has a couple now – and when I walked in through the door there it was… exactly what I was looking for. In fact, more than what I’d been looking for. I asked how much it was and when I was told the price I thoght I’d misheard him, and made him say it again. Nope, same as the first time, so I got it. I didn’t get a chance to set it up and test it until half an hour ago, when I set it up on my porch and trained it on a tree at the end of my yard, but yep, it works, it works just fine…

So, dear readers, let me introduce you to the telescope which will be helping me enjoy comets PANSTARRS and ISON later this year…

Purdy, ain’t she? A 70mm Celestron refractor, complete with three eyepieses, erecting prism, barlow, tripod, carry bag… thank you very much. How much? Well, if I told you that you’d think I was gloating. Let’s just say it was more than £44 and less than £46 and leave it at that…

So, time’s a’ticking, but I have my gear – telescopes, cameras, binoculars. Well, most of it. All I need now, I think, is a good wide angle lens for my DSLR – to allow me to cature the glory of ISON’s 90 degree plus tail! haha! – and I’ll be ready.

Bring it on…

Note: the picture behind my new telescope is a painting of Kendal Castle, painted by my amazingly talented girlfriend Stella, which she’s donated to “Lakes Alive” for their auction in support of this year’s “Mintfest” street festival here in Kendal. You can find more of her work in her gallery, and here’s a better view of the castle picture…

FEBRUARY 10th 2013

…and we are at PANSTARRS minus one month and counting..!

We should get our first proper look at Comet PANSTARRS – and our first good idea of what it will actually look like at its peak – in a month’s time. It’s currently coming in towards the Sun, and lots of people are clearly hoping that it will buck its ideas up and put on a decent show for us. As ever, here on this blog, I’ll just say “Let’s wait and see…”!

FEBRUARY 7th 2013

Well, whaddya know, FINALLY, as the internet starts to groan under the weight of nutters and idiots ranting and raving about how Comet ISON will destroy Earth, or has been sent by God to exterminate Mankind, or whatever,  NASA has woken up to the imminent arrival of Comet PANSTARRS in our sky next month (next month!!! It only seems five minutes ago that I was typing “next March!”). Yesterday NASA released one of its updates, giving information about how, when and where to see Comet PANSTARRS. This was because one of its space probes, DEEP IMPACT, has taken some images of ISON from way, waaaay out in space. You can read (and listen to, and watch) the NASA release here…

The NASA release features what must be the best “How to find PANSTARRS” graphic I’ve seen yet. I made a screengrab with my phone…

You’ll note that the graphic just shows a single long tail; that’s because it just shows the direction of the comet’s straight gas tail. As you’ll have seen from previous entries, below, it might be the comet’s curved, arcing dust tail which steals the show, we’ll have to wait and see…

Meanwhile, a couple of weeks ago I added a page to this blog – which was picked up by WIRED magazine, amazingly!! haha! – suggesting that it *might* be possible for Comet ISON to be seen from Mars, and it MIGHT be possible for it to be photographed by the rovers exploring the red planet. A lot of people thought that wasa fantastic and very excoting idea, but others suggested it was a bit, well, stoopid. Oh yeah? Tell that to NASA; turns out they are already actively planning to look for and photograph the comet from Mars!

YES! I’m going to email Jim Green and ask him more about thse plans! Stay tuned…

Meanwhile, more and more amateurs are now taking images of Comets PANSTARRS and ISON, so this is all starting to feel very real, isn’t it? It’s now February 7th, and we should be looking at PANSTARRS in the evening sky after sunset FOR REAL in just over a month’s time. Can’t wait!

FEBRUARY 5th 2013

Well, I don’t know what’s going on. One website says that Comet PANSTARRS has fizzled, and might not even be visible to the naked eye at its best, while another says it is back on track to be almost as bright as Hale-Bopp was in 1997. I hope it’s the latter, but at this point in time I think we’re just going to have to cross our fingers, keep an eye on the reports of comet observers around the world, and wait to hear from the experts about what we might see in March. In the meantime, if you want to see the latest images of PANSTARRS and ISON, the popular Spaceweather.com site has a gallery of comet images which is updated almost hourly, so keep checking here for the latest pictures of the comets.

I’ve been busy on Photoshop again, combining the latest (brilliant!) computer simulation work being done by Uwe Pilz, one of the very talented members of the Yahoo comets-ml mailing list, with my Sky Safari screenshots, to produce pics showing what PANSTARRS ****MIGHT**** look like if it behaves itself. Uwe’s incredible work generates images which predict the appearance of a comet’s dust tail, and he’s checked its accuracy by running through it the numbers of past comets and seeing how closely his simulated views of their tails match the real thing, seen on photos, and his work is very accurate. He has looked at what PANSTARRS might look like, and his program suggests it will have a strongly curved tail, arcing over to the left. I added those simulations to Sky Safari screenshots – which pretty accurately predict a comet’s location in the sky and the direction of its GAS tail, though not its dust tail – and here’s what I came up with… as usual, I’m NOT claiming “PANSTARRS will look like this!” these are just my artistic impressions based on limited data and a good dollop of optimism, and they show the comet’s location in the sky, and the general appearance its tail MIGHT have if we’re lucky…

I hope it does look something like that, but this is all just wild guessing and adding two and two to get five, so again, I urge everyone out there: let’s just wait and see…

JAN 19th 2013

More potentially bad news re Comet PANSTARRS… as more and more observations come in it seems that the comet is definitely fainter than predicted, and that might mean it will be a lot fainter in March than we were hoping. Here’s the latest observations graph…

Oh… if you follow that curve to its peak you find it reaches magnitude 3. In a dark sky that would still be fairly good, an easy naked eye object. But we’re not going to SEE PANSTARRS in a dark sky, we’re going to see it in a bright, twilight sky, so that lower magnitude is worrying. It might be getting to the “difficult to see” stage by March if it keeps following that trend. Cross your fingers everyone…

JAN 13th 2013

Hmmmm. This might be bad news for the future of Comet PANSTARRS, or it might just be a blip. Look at this chart…

Every dot on that chart is someone’s observation of Comet PANSTARRS, and the two upwards curving lines are graphs climbing towards its maximum brightness based on those observations. That chart shows us that until recently PANSTARRS was on track to reach a peak magnitude of zero or even minus one, but it looks like it’s started to fade a little, and if you continue the curve upwards you see the comet’s maximum brightness reaches just +1. Now, +1 is still pretty good! That’s still “obvious to the naked eye”, but it’s not zero, and it’s a long way off minus one. So… hopefully this is just a blip, and PANSTARRS will climb back up onto that *higher* curve. We’ll have to wait and see… In the meantime, cross your fingers everyone…!

Read more about this here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/comets-ml/message/20415

JAN 6th 2013

This time next year we will all, hopefully, have folders on our computer hard drives packed full of beautiful, spectacular, gorgeous images of Comet ISON, and will be looking back on its appearance in our Christmas skies with great fondness and happiness – or we’ll be cursing its name because after all the build-up it fizzled out to nothing! We’ll just have to wait and see…

But what does the comet look like now?

Well, the easy answer is “not much”! At the moment it’s still a long, long way from the Sun, and is out of the reach of all but the largest amateur telescopes. But it IS being observed, and even photographed, and I’ve generously been given permission by comet observer and expert Nick Howes to post here an animation made of photos taken just a couple of nights ago, with the 2m Liverpool Telescope on La Palma. Here it is (you might need to click on the image to set the animation running, WordPress is a bit funny like that..!)

(Image courtesy of Remanzacco Observatory) The comet is the slightly fuzzy object which is moving from lower right to upper left in the centre of the image during the animation.

That’s it, everyone… that‘s the ball of ice and dirt and dust we’re all expecting so much of, and pinning so many hopes on. Little more than a tiny puffball on images now, what will happen when its frozen body is warmed by the Sun? Will it grow a single, long, searchlight tail which will stretch across the sky like those of such famous past comets like Ikeya-Seki and, more recently, Lovejoy? Or will its tail be an exotic peacock fan with multiple streamers and tattered gaseous banners, like McNaught’s, or Comet West’s from the mid 1970s? Or will it thumb its nose at us and not turn on as we’re all hoping so desperately it will, and just develop a short stubby tail that leaves us all frustrated and disappointed? We can’t know that yet. But reading all the various bulletin board and forum posts, and articles (and there are more every day!) being written about ISON, I get the impression the experts are fairly optimistic, confident even, that it will put on a pretty good show this coming November.

Let’s all cross our fingers…!