[AZ-Observing] Re: Comets on Thursday night

Enjoyed very much seeing the comet(s) in a dark sky for once. A large 
prominent triangle was formed in the sky by Holmes, the Double Cluster and 
Andromeda galaxy, and Comet Holmes looked like a giant bright M1. In the 20", 
it's awesome to see the tiny bright nucleus surrounded by vast nebulosity with 
a sharp cutoff at the leading edge (26mm Nagler at 100x, 0.8 degree field). 
Waited for the wide band of clouds to cross the sky and saw another band 
coming. I used the time to pack up and leave. Too bad, ruined a good night. 
Clear when I got home of course about 2 AM, but still very few meteors.

Jack

Don't know what's wrong with your parsing Steve, or you HTML is on, or Plain 
Text is off. I tried to fix it up below.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Coe" <stevecoe@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <az-observing@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2007 12:14 PM
Subject: [AZ-Observing] Comets on Thursday night


Jack Jones and I were at Eagle Eye road on Thursday night and had lots of fun 
with the two bright comets.  I gave the night a 6 for seeing and a 7 for 
transparency between the Moon setting and the clouds moving in.

Comet Tuttle is in Cepheus, moving toward Cassiopeia.  I found it with the 
8X42 binoculars and it was pretty faint and pretty large in the binoculars. It 
did have a very prominent central core, however.  Moving up to the ED 80 with 
a 14mm UWA eyepiece made for a much better observation.  It is about 8th 
magnitude and 20 arcminutes in size.  The bright core is easy at this power 
and the edges of this round comet are somewhat ragged.  Comet Holmes is still 
a showpiece.  It is easily naked eye, even with the three day old Moon across 
the sky from it.  It is still brighter than either the Double Cluster or the 
Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye, a fascinating sight.

In the ED 80 with a 27mm eyepiece it is the central 60% of the field of view, 
a WOW view.  The "jellyfish" shape is still prominent with a brighter central 
spike or spine that is almost the length of the comet.  There are 14 stars 
involved within the comet.  Averted vision makes it larger and shows off the 
center spike more easily.  This is the perfect scope for this comet.

Moving way up in aperture, using Jack Jones 20 inch Newtonian, the comet will 
not fit in the field, but it is certainly fun to move the scope around and 
view the individual fields at 100X.  The central spine feature is really easy 
and stands out well from the rest of the comet glow.  There is a tiny 
pseudonucleus with the big scope, it is about 13th magnitude.

These two comets made for a great night;
Steve Coe


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