COMET LOVEJOY’S ACTIVE TAIL: Amateur astronomers around the northern hemisphere are reporting activity in the tail of naked-eye Comet Lovejoy (C/2013 R1). In Nagano, Japan, astrophotographer Kouji Ohnishi could see big changes in less than an hour of monitoring:
Michael Jäger saw the same “disconnection event” from his observatory in Masenberg, Austria, on Dec. 5th. The disturbance could be caused by a gust of solar wind or perhaps an episode of vigorous outgassing in the comet’s core.
Comet Lovejoy is now about as bright as a 4th magnitude star. It is visible to the unaided eye from the countryside and is an easy target for backyard telescopes even in urban areas. Monitoring is encouraged. Comet Lovejoy rises in the east just before the morning sun
THE GHOST OF COMET ISON: On Friday, Dec. 6th, leading researchers from NASA’s Comet ISON Observing Campaign (CIOC) held an informal workshop at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. One of the key questions they discussed was, Did Comet ISON survive? It might seem surprising that anyone is still asking. After all, the “comet” that emerged from the sun’s atmosphere on Thanksgiving day appeared to be little more than a disintegrating cloud of dust. This movie from the STEREO-A spacecraft (processed by Alan Watson) shows the V-shaped cloud fading into invisibility on Dec. 1st:
The answer hinges on the contents of that cloud. Is it nothing more than a cloud of dust–or could there be some some fragments of the disintegrated nucleus still intact and potentially active?
A key result announced at the workshop comes from SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. According to the spacecraft’s SWAN instrument, the comet stopped producing so-called Lyman alpha photons soon after its closest approach to the sun. Karl Battams of the CIOC explains what this means: “Without getting technical, Lyman-Alpha is a consequence of sunlight interacting with hydrogen, and if we are not seeing that interaction then it means that the levels of hydrogen (and hence ice) are extremely low. This is indicative of a completely burned out nucleus, or no nucleus at all.”
“The evidence appears strong that at some point approaching perihelion – whether days or hours – Comet ISON likely began to completely fall apart,” he continues. “What remains of ISON now is going to be either just a cloud of dust, or perhaps a few very depleted chunks of nucleus. Either way, it’s not going to flare up at this point and we should assume the comet’s show is over.”
“However, we do need to verify this,” says Battams. “Hopefully the Hubble team can come to the rescue! In mid-December, Hubble will be pointed in the direction of where ISON should be and they’ll try and image something. If no fragments are surviving, or they are tiny, then Hubble will not be able to find anything, but that negative detection will tell us something: namely that ISON is indeed gone for good.”
Today is a day for some excitement, however you might be discovering that your current idea of excitement is not what it used to be. There can be excitement in watching the sunset. There can be excitement in seeing the petals of a flower unfold. There can be excitement in see a soufflé rise perfectly. There can be excitement in watching delight erupt in the face of a child. Things are changing, and along with them, so are you. You can find that words that once meant one things to you have different nuance. There are times today when you might find that you do not recognize yourself in how you react, in what you say, in how you are feeling. This is all part of how you are reacting to the new energies as they flow around you. There is creativity in all of this. And right now, you greatest act of creativity is creating the new you.
