Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Monday, December 19th.  The sun will rise at 8:14.  It’ll be up for 8 hours and 49 minutes, setting at 5:04.   The moon, 2 days past last quarter, will rise at 3:29 tomorrow morning.

Comet Lovejoy surprised most astronomers by surviving its encounter with the sun last Thursday evening.  By Friday morning it was receding from the sun minus its tail.  The tail it had approaching the sun was still there, but what emerged looked like a really bright star.  It fooled me until I saw the animated images that showed the comet disappearing around the left side of the sun and a bright star-like object emerge on the right.  As Friday wore on comet Lovejoy began to grow a new tail.  Over the weekend images came in from all the six solar monitoring satellites.  All had recorded the comet, and some as the comet came very close to the sun to see the interaction of the comet’s tail with the sun’s corona.  The comet has since been picked up from the ground.

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

Addendum

The comet has been photographed by a Las Vegas astronomer in the morning before sunrise!

For more information go to www.spaceweather.com.  Checkout the archive pages too!

Here is a US Navy site following Comet Lovejoy:  http://sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil/index.php?p=news/birthday_comet

For Scott:  I haven’t seen a good magnitude on it yet.  It’s going to be a southern hemisphere object.

Here’s a link to the Elements and Ephemeris of the comet from the Minor Planet Center: http://scully.cfa.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/returnprepeph.cgi?d=c&o=CK11W030