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

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Oh, very cool! Comets are still rather amazing.

Cool!

[seawasp]

I didn't even know about this one.

I would hope it's visible from here, since we're at similar latitudes.

(once more it appears the damn Southern Hemisphere gets the better show, though.)

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Storming. I thought it had already set because I couldn't see it at 16:30, but perhaps the sky was still too bright. I didn't have much chance to sort things out, as I was zooming on my bike from one appointment to the next :-(

[new-brunette.livejournal.com]

I was asking about whether people here had seen it on my journal yesterday. How wonderful - and what a good capture.

[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.