Thursday, May 22, 2008

Oh No! Another Comet

It seems like I've barely finished filling these pages with reports and pictures of Comet Holmes, and now there is a new "bright" comet gracing the evening skies.

Wednesday night was the first really clear night that we've had in a couple months. Fortunately it happened the night after the full moon. The moon wasn't scheduled to come up until 8:30, so Sandra and I zoomed out to one of our darkish star gazing spots to try out our new and "new to us" binoculars, and to try to spot Comet Boattini.

It turns out that the comet was easy to see in both the 10x50 and the 20x80 binos, but looked more interesting in the 20x80s. We couldn't spot it with our naked eye. We were quite pleased with the overall quality of the views delivered by the binoculars.

I took some 10 second long pictures and stacked a bunch of them. The comet is visible in the pictures, but not as impressive as it looked visually. I'll try to get some real pictures if the sky stays clear. The moon won't be up 'till about 9:30 tonight, whoo-whoo!

We have also seen three very nice International Space Station passes the last three evenings.

Here is a web page with a good chart showing where comet Boattini is each night.

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