Comet Pojmanski anyone?

by Ralph Aguirre

I got up this Saturday morning, March 4th, about 4:30am and noticed the skies were pretty clear, so I took out my 20x70 binoculars on a tripod and did some early morning comet hunting. Venus had just cleared the trees, and I noticed Altair was fairly high in the East, so I started panning below Altair, and spotted Pojmanski's large coma right away.

It was larger than I thought it would be and higher in the sky than I thought also. I saw M13 just a few minutes earlier, and the coma was larger than M13. I observed the comet for about the next half hr, and as my eyes adapted more to the darkness, a thin wispy tail started to appear at about the one o'clock position from the coma, and extended beyond the full 3 degrees field of view of my binoculars. I didn't notice any Cyan or Blue color in the coma like many have mentioned, but it was an impressive comet to view, being much larger than I thought. It took some time with my eyes in the binoculars before the comet really looked impressive, so having them on the tripod and letting my eyes adapt to the darkness made the difference.

Its hit and miss with this weather at this time, but if we get another clear morning like this, I may take a look at it with my 14" scope and see how much more I can see. We just have a small window of opportunity to view it at its peek since its moving fast and should being to fade fairly rapidly.

Posted on tac-sac Mar 05, 2006 11:37:45 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Mar 05, 2006 20:05:19 PT