Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Ephemeris for Monday, November 25th.  The sun will rise at 7:52.  It’ll be up for 9 hours and 14 minutes, setting at 5:06.   The moon, at last quarter today, will rise at 12:40 tomorrow morning.

Comet ISON, a bit more than 4 days from its closest approach to the sun on Thanksgiving Day, is now well within the orbit of Mercury only 22 million miles from the sun.  The comet should be hard to spot this morning.  It rises at 6:58 in pretty bright twilight.  The cool thing is that since the tail points away from the sun, it will rise first.  That may be something to look for a quarter to a half hour before the head or coma rises, and in darker skies.  The tail will point to the upper right of the comet’s head.  This too will be something to look for after the comet passes perihelion on Thursday, except the tail will point to the upper left.  I’ll have more on comet viewing for Thanksgiving day on tomorrow’s program.

Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.  They may be different for your location.

Addendum

This animated GIF image was retrieved from the NASA Comet ISON Observing Campaign website:  http://www.isoncampaign.org/  Two comets are seen, the brighter is ISON and the dimmer is Encke.  The two bright objects are Mercury to the left and the Earth to the right.  What looks like clouds flowing past is the solar wind.