Comet McNaught in daylight again ...

by Jay Reynolds Freeman

On Saturday 13 January 2007, I was headed over to Santa Cruz a bit before sunset, and stopped near the crest of State Highway 17 -- in the large parking lot on the west side of the road near the restaurants and all -- for another crack at Comet McNaught. The temperatures were what a coastal Californian calls "cold", and a Vermonter like myself calls "spring-like". A couple of other drivers had stopped with similar intent, using various binoculars up to about a 20x80. I had with me an oldie but a goodie, a Zeiss Jena 6x30 that probably dates from the first half of the twentieth century. And we all had our naked eyes.

Horizon haze and faint bandy clouds made the daytime view more difficult than it had been the day before, earlier in the afternoon, in Palo Alto. Nonetheless, with the Sun still a couple of degrees above the sea horizon, both the person with the 20x80 and I with my 6x30 had glimpsed Comet McNaught, showing coma, nucleus, and a somewhat fan-shaped tail. Through the 20x80 I had the occasional impression of two quite distinct tails pointing in two quite distinct directions, a fan away from the Sun and a narrower streak almost diametrically opposed to the fan, but I am a bit suspicious of the binocular's optics as well, as I did not see this phenomenon in my 6x30.

I could not see the comet with the naked eye while the sun was up, but had a solid naked-eye sighting within a few seconds after the upper solar limb had dipped beneath the horizon. Within a few minutes, everyone at the site had it as well. The comet's naked-eye appearance clearly resembled the fleeting and ghostly phantasm I had intermittently seen with the naked eye the day before.

We had some discussion about the prospect for further observation from these latitudes: If the comet remains this bright, or continues to brighten, it could be a reasonable daytime object for a while yet.

-- Jay Reynolds Freeman

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