12/05/12 – Ephemeris – Comet C/2011W3 (Lovejoy)
Monday, December 5th. The sun will rise at 8:03. It’ll be up for 8 hours and 59 minutes, setting at 5:02. The moon, 3 days past first quarter, will set at 4:16 tomorrow morning.
Four days ago an amateur astronomer discovered a new comet. These discoveries by amateur astronomers are getting rarer these days with all the near earth asteroid searches going on now. This comet was discovered by Australian Terry Lovejoy. It turns out that Comet Lovejoy is a sun-grazing comet which will come only 110,000 miles from the sun’s surface on the 16th of this month. At that distance it’s a good bet that the comet will be vaporized. There have been over 2,000 comets discovered by observers studying the SOHO satellite’s images of the vicinity of the sun, Lovejoy. found the comet when it was just inside Venus’ orbit Looks like SOHO’s LASCO C3 images will be the place to view the passage of the comet by the sun. Google SOHO and NASA to locate the site on the internet.
* Times, as always are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.
Bad Astronomy Link to the story: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/12/04/amateur-astronomer-discovers-sungrazing-comet/
Update 9:27 p.m.
More from NASA: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/pickoftheweek/old/03dec2011/. It contains the expected path of the comet as seen from the earth and SOHO
The comet should enter the field of SOHO’s LASCO C3 imager early on December 14th!
Latest (Real time L)ASCO C3 images are here: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/c3/512/
In the LASCO C2 and C3 images the face of the sun is covered by an occulting disk. The white circle in the center is the actual size of the sun.
Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog 
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