Archive
12/26/11 – Ephemeris – Comet Lovejoy wows southern hemisphere observers
Monday, December 26th. The sun will rise at 8:18. It’ll be up for 8 hours and 49 minutes, setting at 5:07. The moon, 2 days past new, will set at 7:40 this evening.
Comet Lovejoy has been the morning Christmas comet for folks in the southern hemisphere for the past week. After whipping around the sun and losing its tail comet Lovejoy grew another brighter tail that has been greeting early risers in the southern hemisphere since the 17th.. It surprised the astronauts on the International Space Station, who were not given the heads up in advance. However they did get some great time lapse movies of the comet rising. From the ground the tail rose for 40 or so minutes before the head. The comet is moving away from the sun so its heads out tail first. Comet Lovejoy hasn’t made it big on normal news channels, but astronomical sites on the Internet have been buzzing with the latest news.
* Times, as always are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.
Addendum
www.spaceweather.com is a great place to start. Look in their archives for the past week too.
12/19/11 – Ephemeris – Comet Lovejoy survives!
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
Lovejoy Lives!
Barely.
The Solar Dynamics Observer (SDO) detected Comet Lovejoy (C/2011W3) leaving the sun, but thousands of times fainter than it went in. the LASCO C3 and C2 images that I’ve seen for 9:30 UT show the ghost of Lovejoy’s tail. See Below:
Ghost of Comet Not So Past
Sorry, couldn’t help it. It’s the season I guess. However reports of Lovejoy’s death may have been exaggerated. Sorry Mr. Twain.
Update 8:38 a.m.
I dashed off the above as soon as I got up this morning. It wasn’t until later looking at spaceweather.com’s animation of the LASCO C3 images that I found that the over bright star to the lower left of the sun was what’s left of Comet Lovejoy. I took a quick look at Stellarium and saw no planets in that position, so I thought it may have been an artifact. So it appears Lovejoy lost all its volatile components and is probably a bare nucleus like the progenitor of the Geminid meteor shower 3200 Phaethon. I wonder if the brightness of it will change its size estimates?
Ghost tail of Comet Lovejoy. Courtesy of ESO, NASA and the LASCO team.
12/15/11 – Ephemeris – Comet Lovejoy will skim past the sun today
Thursday, December 15th. The sun will rise at 8:12. It’ll be up for 8 hours and 50 minutes, setting at 5:02. The moon, 2 days before last quarter, will rise at 10:39 this evening.
Today Comet Lovejoy will pass 100,000 miles above the surface of the sun. The sun is 865,000 miles in diameter, so that’s very close. Will the comet survive? Will it break into multiple pieces? Or will it evaporate in the sun’s intense heat? To get the latest news on the internet go to Spaceweather,com or space.com. For first hand information google SOHO NASA. Look for real time images. LASCO C3 and C2 are the views you want. These are near white light views with the sun’s face blocked out so the solar corona is visible. The C2 view is closer in than the C3 view. The comet will move from the lower left to upper right. And will go behind the occulting disk that hides the sun. The comet’s tail should be quite long.
* Times, as always are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.
Update 6:09 a.m.
Comet Lovejoy at 9:30 UT or 2:23 a.m. EST. Courtesy of ESA, NASA, LASCO Team.
Click image to enlarge.
12/14/11 – Ephemeris – Where are the bright planets this week?
Wednesday, December 14th. The sun will rise at 8:11. It’ll be up for 8 hours and 51 minutes, setting at 5:02. The moon, 3 days before last quarter, will rise at 9:29 this evening.
It’s Wednesday and time again to take a look at the whereabouts of the bright planets. The planet Venus is prominent in the southwestern twilit sky after sunset setting at 7:12[, and should be visible by 5:45]. Jupiter is now the most prominent planet of the evening sky located in the high in the southeast to south and is seen against the stars of the constellation Aries. It will pass due south at 9:04 p.m. It will set at 3:48 a.m.. Mars will rise at 11:41 p.m in the east northeast and will be in the constellation Leo. [Mars will be due south at 6:17 a.m.] It is 111 million miles away and closing. Saturn will rise at 3:22 a.m. just to the left of the bright star Spica in the east southeast. Remember Comet Lovejoy will enter SOHO’s LASCO C3 frame today.
* Times, as always are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. Text in brackets deleted from the program due to time constraints.
Update 6:16 a.m.
Comet Lovejoy entering at the bottom of the LASCO C3 frame. Courtesy SOHO, ESA, NASA. Timestamp on image.
Click to enlarge.
12/13/11 – Ephemeris – Comet Lovejoy and Kreutz sungrazing comets
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
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 