Comet ISON has begun to enter the field of view of the SOHO satellite around 8:30 pm local this evening. Watch it over the next day as it rounds the solar sphere and begins to fall back out into the solar system, unless it breaks up and becomes a spectacular sight in the next week or two. Either way, it will become an all-night comet later this week.

If someone knows how to post an image on here, please do so...I've forgotten how to post pics, HA!

Bob

Bob -

To learn how to post pictures in the forums, see the forum topic Posting Pictures In The Forums.

Well -

It now sounds like ISON is fading fast and likely that it won't survive perihelion. Too bad. It could have been a good show.

03:30 hrs Friday, November 29, 2013 _ I believe the servers may have taken a crush of traffic and thereby making it difficult to watch like I want to, but some observations of the solar disc DO SEE SOMETHING near the track we expected ISON to take by now. Is it just dust? Possibly! Or is it several respectully sized portions of the main mass that can still put on some kind of visual light show this coming week? We are all waiting to see more from SOHO, STEREO, SDO OR HINODE? That, my dear Watson, is the real question now, isn't it?

Its like waiting for your child being born and refusing to do so on your schedule. Mothers are in physical pain, husbands are in emotional, and worried pain. I can only say that we all have to wait and see what may survive swaddled in a blanket of dust until later today. It could be a strong screaming left-over piece of our solar system. Then again, it may be DOA.

We all have to wait...at least for now.

ISON Lives!!

Thanks for posting this Dave. I still can not access the SOHO site so this really makes me happy to see. I just visited the NASA home page and they too are saying there seems to be at least a small nucleus along with abundant dust. Now the question becomes will we see something before sunrise on Sunday morning and then afterwards. Will it be visible to the unaided eye? That's what I'm holding out for. If we do see something Sunday and Monday morning, it may be the only days that the Comet of the Century reveals itself as the Comet of the week?

I think the long term effects of ISON will be in what we'll see the dust and any small portion does by way of Hubble and other LARGE observatory images reveals. Remember Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann broke into 8 pieces with one fragment seen to have "dozens of house-sized boulders" trailing close behind, as mentioned in Astronomy magazine p-58 (Dec 2013). That was so interesting to me and much was learned by that process for scientists around the world. Until we actually begin landing on and placing small satellites in close orbits around comets, we'll only be able to speculate about what's going on at the surfaces of these cosmic vagabonds. Let's keep our fingers crossed for at least a quick visual peak and for clear skies this week.

Bob

FIN, Comete ISON!

Well, its done. Comets are extraodinarily fragile, some a little more so, others less so. Many comet scientists believe they are loose conglomerates that would resemble a handful of unpacked wet snow; others something akin to a hard snowball, but far less than the density of sandstone. It would seem comet ISON may fall into the first catagory.

With the final image above contributed by David Grosvold, its pretty much a given. Comet ISON did not survive its close brush with our Sun, and only loose dust remains in its orbit to travel back out to the coldest places in the solar system, not likely to ever return. It was a tension filled year for almost every amateur astronomer that ended in disappointment. For the handful of professional comet researchers, their conclusions are still forthcoming. We should see the most detailed scientific papers by March or certainly by June 2014. I'll be anxious to read their results and see their most detailed imagery of the finale that is for all intents and purposes over as of now.

Now, on to the next 2 or 3 snowballs, or even dozens that are headed our way right now still coming our way and may be called the next "Comet of the Century" candidates. Bring 'em on!

I hope everyone enjoyed this little show, even if you can only describe it as a dud. We still learned from the experience.