by Akkana Peck
Geoff Gaherty wrote:
Compared to Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp, yes. Compared to most of the tiny faint comets that we've had lately, this one is HUGE!
I saw it last night, from a star party at Evergreen College in southeastern San Jose.
It took a long time before anyone found it -- it was way off its predicted path, or so we thought -- but, looking at the finder chart (I was using the skypub one at http://www.skypub.com/sights/images2000/0007cclinear1.jpg) in the clear light of day, I realize that we were all looking at the spot for Jul 19, not realizing that it was already close to Jul 20 UT, and in fact the comet was pretty close to the Jul 20 point. I bet that's where we made our error (duh).
I'll let Dave tell the story of how he finally located the comet.
Big or small, it's nice to have a comet that really looks like a comet, and this one does,
Agreed! It had a nice little tail, and actually looked a bit like Hale-Bopp did back when it was in Ophiuchus when it was just starting to reach naked-eye magnitudes. Even looking straight into San Jose's light dome, It was lovely in a 12.5" dob, a 6" dob, and a C-8, and even easily visible (with admittedly not much detail) in an 80mm f/7 refractor. But the absolutely amazing part about it is how fast it's moving! Over 20 minutes or so, the motion was very apparent -- so much so that when as it neared a little double star, we could actually see its motion in the eyepiece relative to the background stars.
