November 29th – The Day After Perihelion

10.00: Comet ISON… oh, you tease… why are you doing this to us?!!

After the heart-in-our-mouths drama of yesterday, things are inevitably a little calmer today. The experts have stopped tweeting and updating Facebook pages every few minutes, and I’m not getting a “can I see comet ISON from where I live?” email from India every ten minutes. But to be honest, we’re no nearer to knowing what has happened to – and what will now happen with – Comet ISON than we were when I finally went to bed in the small hours of this morning.

There’s now no doubt that *something* survived perihelion passage around the Sun. Images taken about an hour or so after perihelion – when most people had started writing their ISON obituaries – clearly showed a feature, or an object, moving out of the Sun’s vicinity and drifting away…

Since then more and more images have been taken, like these…

… and they are giving many ISON watchers real cause for hope, because whatever it is seems to be brightening, and, maybe even growing a tail..? This fantastic pic which I found on the internet (and can’t find the source, sorry) shows brilliantly what happened…

In other words, it’s…well… behaving like a comet…! But is it?

There are several options, several intriguing possibilities. “It” could be just a cloud of dust and grit, continuing to move along ISON’s predicted path, which will now just slowly spread further and further apart until  it vanishes altogether. Or is it the comet’s battered and beaten nucleus, vastly reduced in size and activity by its solar mugging? Or is it something in-between – a cluster of nucleus fragments, moving along together like a kind of cloud of mini comets? I don’t know, I’m no expert myself, but it’s going to be fascinating watching it over the coming hours and days and finding out…

Of course, the question everyone is asking is WILL WE STILL SEE SOMETHING IN THE SKY NEXT WEEK?

Honest answer? We don’t know. That depends on what that…thing… is.

Look at it…

If that is just a gravel stream it’s very unlikely we’ll see anything in the sky, because over the next few days that stream will just drift apart until it’s a cloud and then keep spreading further and further apart until it’s gone. However… if it is one of the other two possibilities – a single, battered nucleus or a cluster of fragments  – then maybe, just maybe, we’ll see something in the sky after all. WHAT we might see is the £64m question. I personally think that if we see anything at all it will just be a very faint, very small comet, through binoculars or a telescope.

Bottom line? I may be wring, and I obviously hope I am, but I don’t think that the beautiful long “like a search beam in the sky” comet of our pre-perihelion hopes and dreams is possible anymore now. ISON took one hell of a battering as it rounded the Sun, and whatever is left must surely be too small and stripped of so many of its volatiles that it can’t regrow an enormous tail and “turn on” enough to be a bright object in the sky. No. I think our chance of seeing a truly Great Comet, like the ones seen in centuries past, is now lost…

But we may still see something. Whatever is heading away from the Sun now is following the same path as the original ISON would have followed, so the charts for December are still relevent.

Is it still worth looking? That’s entirely up to you.

Many will give up on ISON now. They’ll have read the stories about it breaking up, and being fainter than before, and think “Right, I’m done with it; if I can’t see it right in front of my face, from my garden or my front door I can’t be bothered.” But for the rest of us this is now an exciting challenge. Ok, we had all been looking forward to going somewhere dark, looking east and whispering “Wow…!” at the sight of a bright naked eye comet which was just there, in front of us, shouting “Look at me! Look at MEEEEEE!”, but now looking for ISON is going to take some work. Now it becomes a hunt, a test of faith and endurance. Only the dedicated and determined are going to be looking for ISON in the next few days, getting out into the countryside or up a hill before dawn to look for…something…glowing above the eastern horizon before sunrise.

Are you one of them?

ISON captured the imagination of both astronomers and public alike. By yesterday everyone was talking about it. Some were talking absolute rubbish about it of course – the fake Prophets and Ranting Pastors and BPEarthwatchers, the Mountain Wolves and their deluded scientifically ignorant followers – had tried hard to make the comet into something it wasn’t, but failed, and finally, after months of spouting utter BS, fell silent on Perihelion Day, their inane and insane ravings drowned out by the voices of the scientists and the knowledgeable. My own blog, this one you’re reading, had an incredible number of visits from people all around the world desperate for news and advice on how, when and where to look for the comet. Just look at this…

Yes, it was a brilliant day..!

Then, and after all that… this uncertainty. ISON looked like it had shaken itself to bits, but then it, or part or parts of it – emerged from, the glare, and is even now, as you read this, flying away from the Sun, cooling down, the savagery of perihelion falling away behind it…

ISON may yet surprise us. It may yet flare back into life, grow another tail, and reappear in our morning sky and delight us, albeit in a more subtle way than we had been expecting. But rather than be disappointed by that, rejoice in it! For the best part of a year we have all watched a 4.5bn (yes, billion!) year old chunk of ice, snow and grit flying towards the Sun, a visitor from the coldest, darkest depths of our solar system. We watched it get brighter. We watched it grow a tail – stubby and faint at first, but eventually it began to grow and grow, unfurling behind its green head like a glowing medieval banner, growing longer and brighter and more beautiful every day… Then yesterday, on our computer screens, tablets and mobile phones, we all had front row seats for the astronomical show of the year as we watched the comet make its long awaited approach to the Sun, sharing the experience online with countless thousands of others, seeing pictures just an hour or so old, reading reports and comments from some of the world’s most rested comet experts as they saw the same images. It was a global event. The first true People’s Comet, I would dare to suggest…

But ISON’s epic tale is not complete yet. Something survived perihelion, and is now moving away from the Sun.

Don’t go anywhere. The second act of this drama is about to begin…

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17.15: Looks like we have us a comet…

Look at this, hot off the press…

A little closer…

Oh come on, come ON… I know the jury is still out, they need more data, etc etc, but that’s a comet, isn’t it? Doesn’t that look like a comet to you?

( By the way, if you’re thinking “Hang on, I thought comet tails always point away from the Sun… that one isn’t…” well, firstly, well spotted, and secondly, the tail is pointing away from the Sun, even if it doesn’t appear to be. You see, ISON is currently behind the Sun as seen from Earth, so we’re looking kind of down the tail. It’s a perspective thing. )

Obviously things have calmed down a lot since the madness of yesterday, and people are now quietly looking at the new images and trying to make sense of them. Looking at the Tweets from @Sungazer Comets (the Tweet handle for cometary scientist and CIOC blogger Karl Battams) what’s becoming a little clearer is that whatever survived the trip around the Sun is now producing dust, leading to the formation of the – I really hesitate to call it a “tail” but can’t think of another word, so “tail” will have to do – tail coming off the..thing… on the picture above. And it looks like Karl is being asked the same question I am (a lot!!) because earlier today he tweeted this…

“For those asking, we really are not comfortable in speculating on naked eye visibility or not. Just give us a few more days! We’re on it…”

…and that’s the Big Question isn’t it? What happens next? No idea. ISON is a crazy, crazy comet. All we can do is keep watching the images being sent back by SOHO and other space assets, and then wait for some hardy amateur astronomer somewhere to spot something glowing softly low down in the pre-dawn sky. That’s what I’ll be trying to do tomorrow morning – forecast for a lovely clear morning here in Kendal, so it would be unthinkable not to try, wouldn’t it? – and I’ll let you know how that goes. In the meantime, with apologies to my fellow comet watcher and friend Daniel Fischer, who I know is already sick to death of the whole “Comets are like cats” thing, I couldn’t resist taking this photo of Chi pondering the fate of her “distant relation”…