by Bill Arnett
on 00/07/24 12:21 AM, Dave North at north@znet.com wrote:
...Bill Arnett did the smart thing and headed east of the Sierras; I think we can expect a positive report eventually but I haven't heard anything yet...
The spot I picked was just NW of Bodie, CA at an altitude of almost exactly 10000 ft. It was a wonderful site for astronomy: perfect horizons in all directions except NE, no trees, no local lights, no traffic, just us and the sky and ..... :-( the lights of Reno NV 50 miles away to the NW. And as Murphy would have it, the Reno lights were almost exactly where the comet was. So my view of the comet wasn't as good as I had hoped. But still spectacularly better than from my backyard in the city. It took me 6 hours to get there. But upon first seeing the comet in the eyepiece I exclaimed, "That was worth the drive!" And indeed it was.
As my 12" LX200 is now permanently mounted in my observatory, I use my home-built 10" f/6 Dob for traveling. Most of my observing was with a Panoptic 35 which gives 43x and a field about a degree and a half wide.
I estimated the length of the tail to be a little less than the field width so call it one degree. I didn't do any careful magnitude estimates but it was obvious with binos but invisible naked eye. But my eyes aren't the best; I think my sharper eyed friends might have seen it. (And I expect they would have gotten a much darker limiting magnitude estimate; I could see the mag 5.5 stars in UMi but nothing dimmer. But I'm sure it was "really" better than that. The Pipe Nebula was obvious, the Milky Way was as good as I've ever seen.
I saw no ion tail, nor any structure to it. But I didn't really examine it all that closely. I was having too much fun to do real work :-)
on 00/07/23 12:37 PM, Ginger Mayfield at chikadee@earthlink.net wrote:
... The comet ... was close to a field star and we watched as it moved over the star, with the star shinning through the tail!! One of the coolest things I've ever witnessed! ...
I was observing at the same time and saw the same thing :-) Amazing how fast it moved; I couldn't quite see the motion in real time but it was obvious in a minute.