Comet over Cambridge!

[fivemack]

This is comet 2006/P1 McNaught; it's appeared rather unexpectedly, and you can see it very close to the western horizon around sunset, about ten degrees to the right of Venus, until about Sunday - I went to the top of Castle Hill at 5:10 for this shot (after excitingly summoning the whole company!), and it had nearly set.

[ISO1000, 10 seconds, 200/5.6, cropped and brightened in gimp for top one, unaltered below]

Comments

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

Damn 8 bit colour terminals (wish we could upgrade, but a couple of the image viewers haven't been ported to not crash on TrueColor visuals). I shall hopefully remember to look back at these when elsewhere.

McNaught is a local here -- one of the scopes on the mountain is doing a dedicated asteroid search program:
http://msowww.anu.edu.au/~rmn/C2006P1.htm

It's below our horizon at sunset until Saturday, but we'll need a pristine horizon to have any chance of seeing it until even later, if at all. Guess what horizons are like at observatories on top of mountains? Damn, I lucked out by being scheduled on this week. Although I better go back into town tomorrow to pick up my tripod.