Raymond
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I should have posted this more than a week ago, but never got around to it.
I read about this comet in the Boston Globe on Saturday, November 3. Periodic Comet Holmes had already gone around the sun and was heading back out toward the outer part of its orbit, wherever that is, when somewhere beyond Mars it suddenly belched out a large cloud of dust and the dust is visible from Earth. It doesn’t look like a comet with a traditional tail, as we saw 11 years ago with Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp, but through binoculars it can be seen as a fuzzy blob.
Here’s how to find it:
You’re familiar, I trust with the constellation Cassiopeia? Five stars arranged, as Jimmy Durante might have said, like ‘‘a big W.’’ After sunset, it’s in the northeastern sky, about halfway up, and tipped onto its left side (that is, the W is on its side, so that the bottom of the W faces east).
Cast your eyes down from the sideways W toward the horizon, about two Cassiopeia-lengths distance from Cassiopeia. There should be, at this writing, a very narrow diamond of stars, three arranged in a slight arc (the bottom two stars point toward the fourth star of Cassiopeia), and the fourth star, to the left of the other three, is Comet Holmes. It’s been moving toward the middle of those three stars — when I first saw it, right around the time we reverted to Standard Time, the comet and the lower two stars formed an equilateral triangle. By next week, I believe the comet is supposed to pass by that star and be on its other side.
With the naked eye, Holmes looks like a faint star, but with binoculars you can see it better as a comet.
I read about this comet in the Boston Globe on Saturday, November 3. Periodic Comet Holmes had already gone around the sun and was heading back out toward the outer part of its orbit, wherever that is, when somewhere beyond Mars it suddenly belched out a large cloud of dust and the dust is visible from Earth. It doesn’t look like a comet with a traditional tail, as we saw 11 years ago with Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp, but through binoculars it can be seen as a fuzzy blob.
Here’s how to find it:
You’re familiar, I trust with the constellation Cassiopeia? Five stars arranged, as Jimmy Durante might have said, like ‘‘a big W.’’ After sunset, it’s in the northeastern sky, about halfway up, and tipped onto its left side (that is, the W is on its side, so that the bottom of the W faces east).
Cast your eyes down from the sideways W toward the horizon, about two Cassiopeia-lengths distance from Cassiopeia. There should be, at this writing, a very narrow diamond of stars, three arranged in a slight arc (the bottom two stars point toward the fourth star of Cassiopeia), and the fourth star, to the left of the other three, is Comet Holmes. It’s been moving toward the middle of those three stars — when I first saw it, right around the time we reverted to Standard Time, the comet and the lower two stars formed an equilateral triangle. By next week, I believe the comet is supposed to pass by that star and be on its other side.
With the naked eye, Holmes looks like a faint star, but with binoculars you can see it better as a comet.
