Anyone else see Comet Linear (or is it LINEAR?) over the weekend? The SO and I did. I bought him a telescope for his birthday - one of those nifty neato computerized ones - and we’ve finally figured out how to use it.
Despite being half dead from Friday night’s capades, I persuaded him to load the telescope into his truck and we proceeded off to a local park where it’s more or less dark, and we can see much more of the sky than we can in our backyard. This is a fairly large undertaking, as the damn telescope weighs something like 60 pounds, not counting the tripod, all our various books, and nifty red lights. We had a hard time finding the comet, but after 10 or 15 minutes with the binoculars, we were pretty sure we had it. Got out the scope, swore loudly while trying to get it pointed at the comet (everything through the scope is upside down and backwards, so finding things is not always straight forward) and had a fine view. Pretty nifty.
I saw Halley’s; what a disappointment. I drove 30 miles out of town to look. It ended up being a tiny smudge in the southeastern sky. And now I’ll have to wait to my 90’s to see it again.
Athena - That’s pretty cool! I wanted to check it out myself, but, from what I read, it wouldn’t be visible here. (NC) Where are you? Up north, I take it.
AWB - That’s all it’s supposed to be. I’m happy for you that you got to see it.
I’m not really “up north.” I’m in Colorado, at about 40 degrees latitude. I didn’t realize it couldn’t be seen all over the US. Bummer! Now I’m doubly happy I saw it.
congrats! finding Comet LINEAR as one of your first targets is pretty good!
AWD - did you see Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997?..now THAT was impressive!
Myn. - I would think that it’s visible in NC (at least according to a quick glance at a starmap program). If you can see the Big Dipper, then you should have been able to see the Comet last weekend. You might still be able to, but it’s rapidly getting lost in the horizon.
Cool! I haven’t seen any comets lately, but Friday night Purplebear and I took the kids out to a state park where they have a small observatory, and saw some neat stuff, such as 3 nebulas: The doughnut (A dying star) the whirlpool (looks like the Milky Way in plan view) and the Hercules Cluster, which looks like a big fuzz ball of new stars being born. we also saw the Andromeda Galaxy.
Also I had the rare privelege of looking at the right part of the sky when a meteorite came down, breaking up and flaring green. It was way cool. We also saw various small meteorites, and some sattelites.
One of the neatest things was having my eyes so used to the dark that I the strobe reflection off of the observatory wall from a plane passing overhead at about 1500 feet.