Comet 73P, Mount Tamalpais star party

by Michael Portuesi

Oh, jealousy!! We at Lake Sonoma had good transparency but a fair amount of wind and poor seeing. Oh, well! More later.

I observed the comet from Mount Tam last night. Seeing the warnings about fog, we decided against Lake Sonoma and went for higher ground closer to home. We observed with Ken Frank, John Dillon and a couple other SFAA members at the star party.

The fog never materialized, but we got the same wind and poor seeing that Lake Sonoma got.

Great! Did anyone else see two tails on the fragment that was near the keystone, or was I imagining it?

That was fragment C, the brighter of the two. I definitely saw two tails on this fragment, even from moderate light-polluted skies.

So I made some sketches of fragments C and B with my William Optics Megrez 80mm refractor. Notes are included with the sketches.

http://www.jotabout.com/portuesi/astro/sketches/Comets/

(there's other past comet sketches on that page too. just ignore them)

It was public night on Mount Tam, so I started by showing the crowd the Leo Trio. One nice treat were two women visitng SF from Sydney, Australia. We introduced them to the Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Draco and Hercules using a green laser pointer, in addition to showing them views of other northern sky sights with our scopes. It was a lot of fun.

Posted on sf-bay-tac Apr 30, 2006 15:22:36 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.4 May 02, 2006 20:51:57 PT