Dinosaur Point, 4 November 2007

Jay Reynolds Freeman

I was hoping to meet old friends and new, but I got there after dark and basically talked to nobody. Probably many of the folks who do know me won't believe I was there.

Conditions were pretty dry and not very cold. Seeing was a bit wobbly, but transparency seemed reasonable, and the light from the dam was a bother, but not a show-stopper. I rambled through some Messier objects and took a brief look at a small and wobbly Mars, that was nonetheless showing a good deal of shadowy detail.

Comet P/17 Holmes was a marvelous object. I am not into imaging and my sketching talent is nil, but at 77x I could see a short tail within the round but asymmetric coma, and perhaps a star-like nucleus (though that might have been a field star).

Something looked vaguely familiar about Comet Holmes, and I finally figured out what it was: The comet looked like a bright star seen through optics with piles of spherical aberration. When the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, everything looked that way ...

-- Jay Reynolds Freeman, Deep-Sky Weasel