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 Comet SWAN swims through Hercules
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bobmoody
 Sunday, October 29 2006 @ 11:50 pm EST (Read 1542 times)  
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If you're an amateur astronomer, you may have observed the (relatively) bright new comet swimming through the constellation of Hercules this week. You'll need binoculars at the minimum to see it, and you can check with check with either Astronomy or Sky & Telescope magazine websites for a locator map. We observed it visually from Coleman Observatory last evening and were amazed at how quickly it was moving through the eyepiece.

AOAS members Ed Wemmerus, Dale Hall, Ron Medley, Rick Hill and myself were enjoying the clear skies, and some of us observed Comet Swan through my 12.5" f/7 at about 80x and watched as it closed ranks with a 10th or 11th magnitude star around 8:30pm. I saw it heading directly for the star and called everyone else over to see it. The star crept through the haze of the nucleus and indeed was a perfect hit right through the nucleus as we watched.

Mike Holloway has returned to imaging and he has a picture, actually 7 individual frames which were required to capture all of Comet Swan's complex tail structure. We only saw a very, very faint wisp of a tail visually last evening, but Mike's excellent image shows it in great detail. See it by going to Mike's "Holloway Comet Observatory". Look for comet # C/2006 M4, and then look for the final mosiac image.

Browse through Mike's extensive library of images of nearly every telescopic comet seen in the past 3 years and a few from even longer ago.


Bob Moody
 
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