Comet McNaught
Thursday, January 25, 2007
The appearance of the comet, visible to the naked eye in the evening sky since Jan 15, has been making news around Australia for the past week of so. Unfortunately the weather has been socked in since around that time (although it brought much needed rain here) so Monday night was the first time it was visible. I managed to catch it last night at the St Kilda beachfront. Here's one of the pics I got, taken at about 2145 in the evening. Don't let the sky in the photo deceive you, it was already quite dark at the time, the sky looks bright because of the long photo exposure time I used. (For those interested; camera is Canon 30D w/ Tamron 28-75mm lens, photo taken @ 30sec exposure, f5.6, ISO 400)
Some info about the comet from Wikipedia: (More info and pics at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_McNaught ) Comet McNaught, also known as the Great Comet of 2007 and given the designation C/2006 P1, is a non-periodic comet discovered on August 7, 2006 by British-Australian astronomer Robert H. McNaught. It made perihelion on January 12, 2007, and became easily visible to the naked eye for observers in the Southern Hemisphere.
The comet remains visible to Southern Hemisphere observers in both the morning and evening sky, entering the constellation Microscopium on 18 January and is forecast to fade rapidly and drop below 6th magnitude by 9 February. As of 23 January the comet is clearly visible to southern observers in the western sky after sunset, near to the horizon, and left of Venus. It is so bright that its tail can be easily seen in twilight from city locations in the Southern Hemisphere. It may be possible to see portions of the tail from very dark locations in the Northern Hemisphere that are near the equator
PS. Sorry for the long absence, I plead guilty to a case of writers block... :P -
DSM
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ThE DonGSteRs at |7:48 PM|
