Comet Leonard – the New Year’s Comet

Look for Comet Leonard–sighted just last year–to make a bright showing this New Year’s.

 

Comet Leonard, Oct 29, 2021

From EarthSky News:

Exciting news! A much-anticipated comet is brightening and still might become 2021’s brightest comet. Astronomer Greg Leonard discovered the comet that now bears his name – C/2021 A1 (Leonard) – last January 3. Astronomers reported then that discovery images showed a tail for the comet, suggesting we might see a nice tail as Comet Leonard draws closer to the Earth and sun. The comet is now between the orbits of Mars and Earth, heading inward. Comets are typically brightest around the time they’re closest to the sun. And Comet Leonard will reach perihelion, its closest point to the sun, around January 3, 2022. That’s after its closest point to Earth on December 12.

Read more here.

 

 

Comet NEOWISE!

I’ve been neglecting this site, I know  But here’s something worth coming back for:  Comet NEOWISE, which is lighting up skies all over the world.  It’s visible right now to the naked eye in the Northern Hemisphere.  Here’s a recent photo from Slovakia:

Stunning, right?  NEOWISE (named after the space observation satellite that first spotted it) has a 6,800-year orbit, which means it won’t pass this way again until the year 8820, when the Earth will be nothing but a black cinder ruled over by evil robots.  

Space.com has useful information on how to view the comet, pasted here:  

Don’t miss Comet NEOWISE in the evening sky now. It won’t be back for 6,800 years.

By Tariq Malik

“If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, you can see it,” said Joe Masiero, deputy principal investigator of NEOWISE, the NASA space telescope that discovered the comet, in a NASA Science Live webcast Wednesday (July 15).  “As the next couple of days progress, it will get higher in the evening sky, so you’re going to want to look northwest right under the Big Dipper.”

There are a few more comet-observing tips to keep in mind, according to Masiero. 

First, you’re going to want to try and get away from city lights and set up in a location with a clear, unobstructed view of the northwest horizon. 

Then, find out what time your local sunset is. You’ll want to wait until 45 minutes after sunset before hunting the comet.  

“What you want to do is go out right around the time that the first stars start to show up. You’re not going to be able to see it before that,” Masiero said. “It’s probably about as bright as some of the stars in the Big Dipper.” 

To the unaided eye, Comet NEOWISE will look like a fuzzy star with a bit of a tail, according to a NASA guide. But binoculars or a small telescope offer a much better view.

 

And finally, NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day” is posting some remarkable photos of Comet NEOWISE from around the world right now on their Facebook site, “Sky.” Check it out.  Below are just a few.  

Get out there and look for it tonight.  Happy viewing.

 

Comet NEOWISE Poland

 

Comet NEOWISE Canada

 

Comet NEOWISE California

 

 

Comet NEOWISE Madrid

 

 

Comet Borisov Comes this Weekend!

Comet 2I/Borisov, the first-ever interstellar space comet, will sweep around the Sun this weekend.  On Dec. 28 it’ll have its closest approach to the Earth.

Borisov is remarkable because all other known comets have come from within our own solar system.  Borisov, in contrast, has travelled 100 million miles or so from some other solar system (scientists don’t know which one) to visit us. This Sunday it’ll slingshot around the Sun before beginning its return journey to . . . wherever.  

Comet Borisov, of course, reminds us of another famous Christmas comet–Comet Kohoutek, which caused such a stir when it swept around the Sun in December of 1973. Astronomers then wondered if Kohoutek might be an interstellar comet, too.  (It wasn’t.) An excellent and entertaining fictional account of Comet Kohoutek, I’m told, can be found in the novel THE NIGHT OF THE COMET, by Mr. George Bishop, Jr.

It’ll be too faint to see with the naked eye, but you can read more about it here at CNN.com, and track its path here at https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4758

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Great Comet of 1861

The Great Comet of 1861 was “discovered” today, May 13, 1861, by John Tebbutt, a sheep farmer and amateur astronomer of Windsor, New South Wales, Australia.

(An impression of the great comet of 1861 as seen from Kent on the evening of June 30th. The Earth is believed to have passed through the comet’s tail on this day. Painting © Chris Chatfield.)

“The comet of 1861 was not the most spectacular of the nineteenth century (that probably being the comet of 1811) or the most beautiful, which was Donati’s of 1858, but its appearance was dramatic, and it interacted with the Earth in an almost unprecedented way. For a while the Earth was actually within the comet’s tail, and the inhabitants of this planet had a brief but giddy view of streams of cometary material converging towards the distant nucleus. By day also the Sun was dimmed as the Earth ploughed through the comet’s gas and dust.”

More about the Comet of 1861 here.  

April Fool’s Day Comet

Really it’s named comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák, but that doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it? This Saturday night, April 1, 2017, it’ll make its closest flyby of Earth since its discovery in 1858.

You’ll need a strong pair of binoculars or a telescope to see it. More about it here.

Tons of Cosmic Dust Everywhere

A recent New York Times article describes a cool phenomenon that gets a mention in THE NIGHT OF THE COMET:  the tons of cosmic dust that rain down on the Earth every day.  10 tons of it, every day.

These examples of space dust found on Earth are collected in a new book, “In Search of Stardust: Amazing Micro-Meteorites and Their Terrestrial Imposters,” and were found on buildings, parking lots, sidewalks and park benches. Credit Jan Braly Kihle/Jon Larsen.

Says the article:

“The dust consists of tiny remnants from the solar system’s birth, including debris from the lumps of dirty ice known as comets and from ages of smashups among planets and the big rocks known as asteroids. While most of the particles are interplanetary in nature, some contain grains of matter from outside the solar system, or true stardust . . .

“’Your car is covered with cosmic dust,’ Dr. Brownlee said. ‘We inhale this stuff. We eat it every time we eat lettuce. But normally, it’s incredibly difficult to find.'”

The article describes how one amateur scientist finally devised a way to find and photograph all this stuff.  Click on the above link in the title to read, or see the full text below. 

 

After decades of failures and misunderstandings, scientists have solved a cosmic riddle — what happens to the tons of dust particles that hit the Earth every day but seldom if ever get discovered in the places that humans know best, like buildings and parking lots, sidewalks and park benches.

The answer? Nothing. Look harder. The tiny flecks are everywhere.

An international team found that rooftops and other cityscapes readily collect the extraterrestrial dust in ways that can ease its identification, contrary to science authorities who long pooh-poohed the idea as little more than an urban myth kept alive by amateur astronomers.

Remarkably, the leader of the discovery team — and co-author of a recent paper in Geology, a monthly journal of the Geological Society of America — turns out to be a gifted amateur who devoted himself to disproving the skeptics.

A noted jazz musician in Norway, he rearranged his life to include eight long years of extraterrestrial sleuthing. His hunt has now produced a significant discovery, a colorful book for lay readers and what scientists call a portrait gallery of alien visitors.

“I hope and believe this will start something,” the musician, Jon Larsen, said in an interview. His goal? “Making it easy.”

His book, “In Search of Stardust: Amazing Micro-Meteorites and Their Terrestrial Imposters,” due out in August, details the secret of his extraordinarily successful hunts. Its 150 pages and 1,500 photomicrographs, or photos taken through a microscope, tell how Mr. Larsen taught himself to distinguish cosmic dust from the minuscule contaminants that arise from roads, shingles, factories, roof tiles, construction sites, home insulation and holiday fireworks.

As his book puts it, “To pick out one extraterrestrial particle among billions of others requires knowledge both about what to look for and what to disregard.”

The diminutive flecks to which Mr. Larsen, 58, has devoted himself represent the smallest parts of a cosmic downpour that has lashed the Earth for billions of years.

Careful observers of the night sky are familiar with shooting stars — speeding bits of extraterrestrial rock that plunge through the Earth’s atmosphere, often burning up completely. The biggest can strike the ground, some forcefully enough to dig craters. In 2013, a relatively small rock exploded over the Russian city Chelyabinsk, releasing a shock wave that injured hundreds of people, mainly as windows shattered into flying glass.

But all that represents a tiny fraction of the downpour. Scientists say most of the cosmic material is remarkably small — barely the width of a human hair. Known as micrometeorites, they rain down on the planet more or less continuously but have proved remarkably hard to find. Some bits are so small and lightweight that they drift down to the Earth’s surface without melting.

The dust consists of tiny remnants from the solar system’s birth, including debris from the lumps of dirty ice known as comets and from ages of smashups among planets and the big rocks known as asteroids. While most of the particles are interplanetary in nature, some contain grains of matter from outside the solar system, or true stardust. Their diversity makes them excellent windows on the cosmos.

Scientists have found micrometeorites mainly in the Antarctic, remote deserts and other places far from civilization’s haze. Starting in the 1940s and 1950s, investigators tried to find them in urban areas but eventually gave up because of the riot of human contaminants.

Significantly, it turns out that specialists trying to establish the cosmic origins of the tiny specks have tended to examine their chemical signatures rather than their overall appearance. That left a large opening for Mr. Larsen.

Matthew J. Genge, one of the Geology paper’s four authors and a senior lecturer in earth and planetary science at Imperial College, London, used an electron microprobe at the Natural History Museum in London to determine the chemical makeup of Mr. Larsen’s finds and confirm their cosmic origin.

In an interview, he said that, over all, the grains that survive the atmospheric plunge and land on the Earth’s surface add up to more than 4,000 tons annually, or more than 10 tons a day. “He’s done a valuable thing in classifying the contaminants,” Dr. Genge said of Mr. Larsen’s work. “It has wide-reaching implications.”

Donald E. Brownlee, an astronomer at the University of Washington who helped establish the field, called Mr. Larsen a true citizen scientist whose work will aid the global hunt for the tiny specks.

“Your car is covered with cosmic dust,” Dr. Brownlee said. “We inhale this stuff. We eat it every time we eat lettuce. But normally, it’s incredibly difficult to find.”

Mr. Larsen came to what he calls Project Stardust as a jazz guitarist in Norway, perhaps known best as the founder of Hot Club de Norvège, a string quartet. His group helped spur the global revival of gypsy jazz.

As Mr. Larsen tells the story, he was an enthusiastic rock collector as a child but did so well as a musician that he set aside his early scientific ambitions. Then, in 2009, at a country house outside Oslo, he was cleaning an outdoor table when a bright speck caught his eye.

“It was blinking in the sunlight,” he recalled. He touched the fleck. “It was angular in some way, kind of metallic but so small — a tiny dot.”

Intrigued, Mr. Larsen suspected it was a cosmic visitor and began to look for more. He collected dust samples from Oslo and cities around the globe, moonlighting as a scientist while vacationing or touring with his jazz group. He took samples from roads, roofs, parking lots and industrial areas.

Put indelicately, he collected hundreds of pounds of dreck — sludge from drains, gutters and downspouts, the dregs of civilization that most people try to avoid.

“Still, I didn’t find a single micrometeorite,” he recalled. “It was very frustrating.”

Mr. Larsen then changed tactics. Rather than looking exclusively for cosmic dust, he taught himself how to classify the dozens of different kinds of earthly contaminants, starting a process of elimination that slowly narrowed the candidates and raised the chances that some tiny fraction of the urban debris might turn out to belong to the cosmos.

The breakthrough came two years ago. In London, Dr. Genge studied one of the gathered particles — from Norway, not Timbuktu — and confirmed that it was indeed a traveler from outer space. Mr. Larsen quickly identified hundreds more.

“Once I knew what to look for, I found them everywhere,” he said.

In the Geology paper, the scientific team reports the discovery of about 500 micrometeorites — collected mainly from roof gutters in Norway — and tells of the detailed analysis of 48 of the extraterrestrial specks. The team includes two of Dr. Genge’s students, Martin D. Suttle of Imperial College and Matthias Van Ginneken of the Université Libre in Brussels.

The team described the cosmic dust as the youngest collected to date, because gutters tend to get cleaned fairly regularly. Also, urban surfaces are recent arrivals in the global landscape compared to polar ice and ancient deserts.

In his travels, Mr. Larsen recently visited with Michael E. Zolensky, an extraterrestrial materials scientist in Houston at the Johnson Space Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. They not only talked shop but also went up to the roof of the large building that houses rocks from the Apollo moon program.

“It was pretty cool,” Dr. Zolensky said. “The curation building is now a collector of cosmic dust.”

In an interview, Mr. Larsen described his method — sorting through the contaminants in a process of elimination — as “something that anybody can do. It could and should become part of teachings in schools, an aspect of citizen science.”

Dr. Brownlee of the University of Washington agreed. He said that, while many schools try to find cosmic dust particles in programs meant to make science classes more inviting and accessible, few if any succeed. “It could help a lot,” he said of Mr. Larsen’s method. “For education, it’s pretty cool.”

Dr. Genge of Imperial College said Mr. Larsen’s techniques, if adopted widely, might also open a new lens on the cosmos.

The gravitational pull of the planets, he noted, appear to tug on the dust clouds of the solar system and slowly change their orbits. He said a wave of new terrestrial finds could help scientists better map the clouds, raising more questions for science about the structure of the universe.

“I consider my microscope a telescope,” Dr. Genge said. “It can give you a pretty big picture.”

 

An Eclipse, a Comet, and a Full Moon all Coming this Friday Night: Prepare for the Endtimes!

 

From USA Today.  Skywatchers will enjoy a rare space triple-header Friday night and early Saturday morning: A “penumbra” lunar eclipse during the full “snow” moon — and the flyby of a comet.

Here’s a look at what you will see if you set your eyes to the night sky:

Penumbral lunar eclipse

Eagle-eyed skywatchers will see a “penumbral” lunar eclipse Friday evening during the full moon.

Not as spectacular — or noticeable — as a total lunar eclipse, this rather subtle phenomenon occurs when the moon moves through the outer part of Earth’s shadow (known as the penumbra), according to EarthSky.org.

The outer shadow of the Earth blocks part — but not all — of the sun’s rays from reaching the moon, making it appear slightly darker than usual.

The exact moment of the penumbral eclipse is 7:43 p.m. ET (6:43 p.m. CT, 5:43 p.m. MT and 4:43 p.m. PT), NASA said.

The eclipse will be visible from Europe, Africa, western Asia and eastern North and South America, NASA reports.

About 35% of all eclipses are of the penumbral type.

Full “snow” moon

As required during any lunar eclipse, the moon will be full Friday night. And this month it’s nicknamed the “snow” moon.

According to the Farmers’ Almanac, full moon names date back to Native Americans in the northern and eastern U.S. Each full moon has its own name.

“The tribes kept track of the seasons by giving distinctive names to each recurring full moon,” the almanac reports. “Their names were applied to the entire month in which each occurred.”

Calling February’s full moon the “snow” moon is right on target: On average, February is the USA’s snowiest month, according to data from the National Weather Service.

The Farmer’s Almanac reports some tribes referred to February’s moon as the “hunger” moon, because harsh weather conditions made hunting difficult.

Comet 45P

A few hours after the eclipse, Comet 45P, which has been visible after sunset for the past two months through binoculars and telescopes, makes its closest approach to Earth, when it will be “only” 7.4 million miles away, NASA said.

Look to the east around 3 a.m. Saturday morning, where it will be visible in the sky in the constellation Hercules. Binoculars or a telescope could be helpful. Watch for a bright blue-green “head” with a tail.

It will be visible in various points of the night sky until the end of February, according to NASA. If you miss it, don’t worry: It will return again in 2022, said Jane Houston Jones of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

 

Happy Hour on Comet Lovejoy

NASA writes about a new report from French scientists on observations made of Comet Lovejoy as it passed around the sun early this year:

“‘We found that comet Lovejoy was releasing as much alcohol as in at least 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak activity,’ said Nicolas Biver of the Paris Observatory, France, lead author of a paper on the discovery published Oct. 23 in Science Advances.”

Here’s the first part of the NASA news release. Cheers!

20150212cometelovejoy1

Researchers Catch Comet Lovejoy Giving Away Alcohol

Comet Lovejoy lived up to its name by releasing large amounts of alcohol as well as a type of sugar into space, according to new observations by an international team. The discovery marks the first time ethyl alcohol, the same type in alcoholic beverages, has been observed in a comet. The finding adds to the evidence that comets could have been a source of the complex organic molecules necessary for the emergence of life.

“We found that comet Lovejoy was releasing as much alcohol as in at least 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak activity,” said Nicolas Biver of the Paris Observatory, France, lead author of a paper on the discovery published Oct. 23 in Science Advances. The team found 21 different organic molecules in gas from the comet, including ethyl alcohol and glycolaldehyde, a simple sugar.

Comets are frozen remnants from the formation of our solar system. Scientists are interested in them because they are relatively pristine and therefore hold clues to how the solar system was made. Most orbit in frigid zones far from the sun. However, occasionally, a gravitational disturbance sends a comet closer to the sun, where it heats up and releases gases, allowing scientists to determine its composition.

Comet Lovejoy (formally cataloged as C/2014 Q2) was one of the brightest and most active comets since comet Hale-Bopp in 1997. Lovejoy passed closest to the sun on January 30, 2015, when it was releasing water at the rate of 20 tons per second. The team observed the atmosphere of the comet around this time when it was brightest and most active.

The Comet Chaser Lives!

In case you were wondering whatever happened to the Rosetta spacecraft and its probe Philae that crash-landed on Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko back in November and then went dead: the probe has awakened. As of yesterday, the little lost lander was sending signals again back to Earth.

“Philae is doing very well,” project manager Stephan Ulamec said.

Here on a quiet, cloudy morning in New Orleans, this news cheers me.

Rosetta2

Rosetta Makes Unexpected Discovery About Comets

Last month I posted again about the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission. The spacecraft, after chasing Comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko for ten years, finally caught up with it.

Here’s the comet:

07comet-cnd-master675

Now scientist have announced this finding from Rosetta:

European Scientists Conclude That Distant Comet Smells Terrible

A European spacecraft orbiting a distant comet has finally answered a question we’ve all been wondering: What does a comet smell like?

“It stinks,” says Kathrin Altwegg, a researcher at the University of Bern in Switzerland who runs an instrument called ROSINA that picked up the odor.

The European Space Agency has posted a full rundown of the comet’s BO on its website. The mix includes ammonia (NH3), hydrogen sulphide (H2S), formaldehyde (CH2O) and methanol (CH3OH).

Of course, anyone visiting the comet would be wearing a spacesuit (on top of that, the sense of smell is notoriously numb in space). Nevertheless, taking a whiff of this comet would be like sharing a horse barn with a drunk and a dozen rotten eggs.

“It’s quite a smelly mixture,” she says.

The Rosetta mission has gotten to within just a few miles of the comet. Close enough to whiff its coma, or atmosphere, and conclude that it really stinks.

Why didn’t we know comets smelled so bad before?

“That’s mostly because we’ve never been that close to a comet,” says Altwegg. The Rosetta mission is now just 5 miles from the comet’s surface.

It’s just like a person: You can’t really get a good sense of a person’s body odor until you’re right up next to him.

These chemicals are also clues to how the comet — and maybe how our solar system — formed. And for that reason, Altwegg doesn’t really mind the stench.

“It’s a little smelly, but at the moment it’s a lot of fun to go to work every morning,” she says.

Fun for now. But that could change. The comet is currently getting closer and closer to the sun. And like anything you leave out in the sun too long, it will soon start to smell even worse.