Skip to main content

Comets




The newly discovered comet Neowise has been in the sky recently. Our state has been blessed with good weather, so everyone who wants to can see it. Well, everyone except for those of us who live on the coast. We get clouds every night. But Friday night it looked like we might get a break. There were high, wispy clouds but we thought it might be possible. My wife and I went outside just after sunset and walked around the block. Too much light. We walked around it again. Too much light. We walked around again. I got my binoculars out and scanned the northwest sky. All total, we were out there about 45 minutes, but we found nothing. My wife went to bed and about 15 minutes later I tried again. Now it was certainly dark enough. I could see the Big Dipper (one of the landmarks for finding the comet) but only faintly. This close to the ocean, there is always a haze that rises up from the west. The dipper was barely peaking out through the haze and that did not bode well for the comet. Indeed, the comet did not make an appearance to me.

Comets are bodies composed of ice, dust, and rock. Scientists sometimes refer to them as dirty snowballs to help people visualize them. They are generally in orbit around our sun. They have a highly elliptical orbit and come in two flavors:  short-period comets which return to the sun in tens to hundreds of years, and long period comets which return in thousands to millions of years. As a comet gets close to the sun the solar radiation causes the ice and other volatiles to turn to gas. This, and the dust that gets released, produces the tail of the comet. Regardless of what direction the comet is moving, the tail is always pointing away from the sun. that is because it is pushed away from the comet by the solar wind. Comets actually have two tails, one of gas and one of dust. The dust tail is somewhat less affected by the solar wind so it points away at a slightly different angle than the gas tail. Tails can be millions of miles long.

Comets that can be seen with the naked eye are pretty rare. I remember when comet Kohoutek came along in 1973 and it was supposed to be the “comet of the century”. Kohoutek was a dud. That is one problem with comets: How visible they will be is hard to predict. Both Kohoutek and another one that they had high hopes for this spring (I forget the name), both looked promising in early observations, but they partially disintegrated as they got close to the sun.

Despite this, I have seen comets before. In 1986 I saw the most famous one of all, Halley’s comet. There wasn’t a lot to see as the geometry was not good for Earth viewing. But given good directions on where to find it in the sky, my wife, and I went out with binoculars and found the fuzzy spot that was the comet. I even tracked its progress against the backdrop of stars for a few nights.

In 1996, I got to see comet Hayakutake. This was a naked eye comet which we could see without aid. Then in 1997 I got to see comet Hale-Bopp. That was two comets visible to the naked eye in two years. We were starting to feel like this was a regular thing. Then, nothing until 2020. Well, actually there have been a lot of comets between 1997 and 2020. Comets come all the time, it is just that most of them are not very visible.

We went out again on Saturday to look for Comet Neowise. My wife and I looked for a while. Eventually she gave up and went to bed. I tried again about 10:15, scanning the sky with my binoculars. The weather was clear, and it just felt like I should be able to find it. Then, there it was! I couldn’t exactly see it with the naked eye, but it was clear in the binoculars. I tentatively went into the bedroom to see if my wife was still awake. She said, “is it there?” I said yes, and she said, “I’m coming.” She got dressed and we went outside. I pointed out where to look with the binoculars. She was satisfied and went back to bed (she's a trooper). 

One of my ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’ items when I was a kid was: astronomer (along with astronaut, race car driver, Olympic athlete, actor, chemist, politician, and naval officer). Most of those dreams had changed by the time I grew up, but that doesn’t mean I lost my love of the stars.


(My science fiction novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources).


Link to Star Liner

Comments

  1. PipJuly 21, 2020 at 4:04 PM

    Oh I loved reading this, truly. My favourite subject. I saw the comment on the news but didn't take much notice, which I'm ashamed to say. Thank-you so much for this great description.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ScottJuly 21, 2020 at 7:58 PM

    Thank you. I have always felt comets were cool



    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove

  Despite both of us having science backgrounds, my wife and I share a leaning toward the artistic, though we may express it in different ways. In her life, my wife has been a painter, a poet, a singer, an actor, and a fiction writer. Not to mention a mother. I don’t remember what precipitated this event, but my wife, my son, and I were at home in the front room. My wife was responding to something my son said. She said, “remember, you get half your brains from me. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be a complete idiot.” To which my son started howling with laughter and said to me,” I think you have just been insulted.” Sometimes I feel like Rodney Dangerfield. I get no respect. But that is not an uncommon state of affairs for fatherhood. When my son was going to middle school and high school, my wife was always the one to go in with him to get him registered for classes. One time she was unable to go and I had to be the one to get him registered. “Ugh,” he said. “why can’t Mama do i...
1 comment
Read more

Empathy

  Websters defines Empathy as: “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” Empathy is what makes us human, though lord knows there are many humans who don’t seem to have any. A person without empathy is like a caveman, only concerned for himself. Selfish. It is a lack of community and by extension, a lack of the need for civilization. The person who lacks empathy can have a bit of community, but only with others exactly like himself. It seems like societies go through cycles of empathy and less empathy. Sometimes a single event can change the course of society. Prior to America’s involvement in WWII, the general feeling in America was not very empathetic. We had our own problems. We were still dealing with the lingering effects of the Great Depression, and had been for years. That kind of stress makes it hard to think of others. Hitler was slashing through Europe. He and his fol...
1 comment
Read more

A Deception

  I have a secret. I deceived my mother. Okay, it was like 50 years ago and she is gone now, but still . . .  I was generally a good boy. I did as I was told. My family lived a pretty strait-laced, middle-class, fairly conservative life. We were a G-rated family, well, until my older siblings broke the mold, but at this time, I was still in the mold. My friend Rich and I made a plan. Rich had asked me if I wanted to see Cabaret . He said he didn’t think much of Liza Minnelli, but he wouldn’t mind seeing her take her clothes off. We were like 13 years old and sex was ever-present on our minds as much as it was absent in our households. Cabaret was not rated R. It was rated PG. The ratings system has changed since that time. There was no PG-13; there was just the choice of G, PG, and R  (X was not an official rating).  Apparently the makers of Cabaret satisfied the ratings commission enough to escape an R rating, so it was PG.   There was therefore no law or ...
Post a Comment
Read more