by Richard Lawler
We got some wonderful views of Ikeya-Zhang last night from the back deck which has fairly dark west views out over the ocean a couple miles away. The weather was windless and much warmer than the weekend, but still cool. The western horizon was mostly clear of the marine layer soup with the Faralone Islands easily visible some 25 miles away due west at sunset.
I hustled to get the Tak 90 set up on the EM-10 as I'd gotten a late start. I wanted the precision of the EM-10 since I didn't know how hard it would be to find this thing. I didn't quite know how bright or big it would be. And there are usually a lot of distractions around my house at that time of night. But I knew it would be 30-deg up at sunset, and I had to catch it before it descended into the ecliptic-eating-tree down the hill. Finally eq. aligned and TheSky goto computer synchronized and checked and then slewed to the comet and... boom dead center there it was easily outshining the neighboring mag 5 stars. Est mag brigher than 4.
The wife said "All I see is a blob." "Yea I see the bright fuzzy thing that's not like the pinpoint stars." My seven-year-old though it was very cool. But swore he had seen thousands of those before (!?).
As the sky darkened the tail became more easily visible extending across the field of view up to a degree and a half.
Then the tree ate the comet and we ate dinner.
122W
37N