Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Tuesday, December 13th.  The sun will rise at 8:10.  It’ll be up for 8 hours and 51 minutes, setting at 5:02.   The moon, 3 days past full, will rise at 8:21 this evening.

Comet Lovejoy which will pass close to the sun Thursday is not alone.  It belongs to the  Kreutz sungrazing group of comets.  They are named after Heinrich Kreutz the 19th century astronomer who discovered some of the great comets of history were sungrazers and had similar orbits.  Astronomers , trying to backtrack the comets, think the original comet broke up maybe in the 4th century AD into two unequal fragments, that have continued to fragment during close approached to the sun.  The SOHO spacecraft can detect these comets toward the sun.  Over 1,500 Kreutz sungrazer comets have been found on SOHO photographs.  Comet Lovejoy should enter SOHO’s LASCO C3 image frame starting tomorrow morning.  Google SOHO and NASA to locate the site on the internet.

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime-images.html

* Times, as always are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.

Addendum

Here’s something like what we’ll see in the next two days.

A Kreutz Sungrazer in 1996 seen by SOHO. Credit: LASCO, SOHO Consortium, NRL, ESA, NASA