by Tom Campbell
| Observer | Tom Campbell |
|---|---|
| Location | Iola, Kansas (Long: 95°24'W Lat: 37°55'N) |
| Equipment | Simmons 10x50WA |
| Time | 9:00pm - 9:30pm CDT (02:00-02:30 UT) |
| Transparency | Clear (8/10) |
| Seeing | Stable (8/10) |
| Weather | Temperatures in the upper 60s. There was a little breeze. |
Tonight, it was about 9:00pm CDT when I got home, but I wanted to try and spot Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT). I grabbed my binoculars for a quick peek. It's low enough in the sky to be a difficult target for me, and I actually had to sneak into my east neighbor's yard (she doesn't mind) for it to appear over our western neighbor's 2-story house.
Through binoculars, Comet NEAT appeared as a wide oval smudge, reminding me of a fingerprint. The bright coma was nearly in the center. The background sky was still too bright to make out any real detail in my binoculars.
While letting my brother Terry look at the comet through my binoculars, I just casually scanned the sky. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a glint appear towards Virgo. Looking, I saw what appeared to be a fairly bright satellite going nearly parallel with the eastern horizon. It started fading, and I just started to tell my brother about the satellite when it suddenly erupted into a bright orange streak! It was a meteor! A second later, it was gone, but that was the first meteor that I remember seeing fade and then brighten again.
As I was telling Terry about what I had just seen, another glint caught my eye overhead. This time, it was a satellite, reflecting the Sun for a few seconds before quickly fading to become barely visible.
After Terry had satisfied himself with his view of the comet, I took the binoculars and aimed them at Jupiter. Tonight, three of the moons were far enough away from the glare of the gas giant to detect. Ganymede and Europa were barely visible on the eastern side of the planet, and I could see Callisto on the western side.
After that, I just played around for a while with the binoculars, making sweeps of various parts of the sky and taking advantage of the comfortable temperature. I saw Corvus peeking over some treetops in the south, so I used my binoculars and followed my recently-discovered "Sombrero Highway" from Gamma Corvi to M104 (The Sombrero galaxy), which appeared as a faint, oblong smudge. Other objects I viewed included Berenice's Hair (Mel 111), M44 (The Beehive cluster), M67, and M35.
Posted on sf-bay-tac May 07, 2004 08:54:19 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.1 Jul 11, 2004 12:28:45 PT