Dear Lookout Observatory Fan,
It has been a little over a year since the last email from Lookout Observatory, so it’s time to make contact again. Today I want to alert you to a comet barely visible off the handle of the Big Dipper. This is Comet Lovejoy (also known as C/2013 R1). It was discovered by Australian amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy on September 7 of this year. It will circle the sun, making it’s closest approach to the sun just about Christmas day. Because it is closer to the Earth now, it is currently the brightest it is going to get. It is just barely visible to the naked eye in a dark sky, but it is visible in binoculars as a dim fuzzy patch even in light-polluted skies. But you have to be up before sunrise! About 5 AM is a good time to see it, about halfway up in the sky to the northeast. If you want to look for it, I’ve attached a photo of a finder chart from Sky&Telescope magazine. Every other tic mark is labeled with a November date. On any particular date, you should look halfway toward the next tic mark — that’s where the comet will be just before sunrise. It is moving pretty fast — about 3 degrees a day, so it will soon move beyond where this chart shows. And it will gradually fade.
If you hate getting up that early, you can just look at my second attachment. This is a photograph I took between 5:15 and 5:55 AM on the morning of November 25. The view is about 1 degree by 1 degree, or twice the diameter of the full moon. As you can see, the greenish head of the comet has a tail almost 1 degree long. This photo is 30 one-minute exposures stacked with the comet images on top of each other. Since the comet was moving relative to the background stars, the stars appear as streaks. Each streak shows how far the comet moved during the 40 minutes it took me to expose and download each of the 30 digital pictures. The exposures were made through a 6-inch diameter telescope with a 730mm focal length from my back yard in Albany, CA. Not only was there considerable San Francisco Bay Area light pollution, there was also a last quarter moon adding light to the sky. Nevertheless, through the magic of digital processing, I was able to capture the very faint tail.
On a personal note, my brother, two years older, died on Halloween. This has led me to reflect on the brevity with which a bunch of atoms (created originally in the interior of stars) come together in a magical way to create the mystery of a brilliant life, and then all too soon disintegrate back into lifeless atoms. Comets come from deep space, circle the sun (which briefly energizes them to glow brilliantly), then fade as they return into deep space. So I send you this picture of a soon fading comet in memory of my already faded brother. And reflecting on this comet’s name, I wish you both Love and Joy.
Keep looking up,
Carter Mehl.
(sometime) Resident Astronomer,
Lookout Observatory
