Comet McNaught From Pacific Grove, CA

by Peter Natscher

I drove 10 minutes over to the beach offering a truly flat western horizon at Pt. Pinos in Pacific Grove to see comet McNaught before it disappears into the sun this week. I parked at a rocky beach bluff near the lighthouse by 4:30 pm, early enough to take advantage of the "magic hour" for digital picture taking with my new D200. By sunset, the colors showing up in my images of the hundreds of seaguls sitting by the rocks and crashing surf turned out to be surreal. By 5:30 pm, the sun had left a beautiful red-orange glow on top of the ocean's horizon and now Venus was beginning to blaze and with pure-white Altair visible 30 degrees up. I began sweeping with my 7x50 binoc's back and forth along the WSW horizon where the greatly distorted pyramid-shaped sun had just set 20 minutes earlier. Back and forth for fifteen minutes showed nothing but distant specs of seaguls gliding far out over the ocean swells. My eyes were having trouble staying focused at infinity while looking thru my binoc's at a flat magenta sky with nothing else distinctly visible. Then, during another slow sweep 3.5 degrees over where the sun had set, there it was: a faint but sharp stellar cometary nucleus with a nebulous surrounding coma along with a delicate tail extending 1/2 degree to the north. I was able to follow Comet McNaught for 15 precious minutes. It was only 1/2 a field of view (3.5 degrees) in my 7x50's above the ocean's flat horizon when I found it and it quickly disappeared in the marine haze caused by the heavy surf. It was perhaps the shortest viewing of a comet of all I've seen in many years.

Peter Natscher
Monterey, California