An interplanetary wanderer named Comet Lulin is making a pass through the inner solar system right now. When discovered in mid-2007, Lulin was still inbound, and calculations showed that it might well put on a decent display once it passed its closest to the Sun and Earth in early 2009.
Comet Lulin steadily grew brighter and finally rounded the Sun back on January 15th. By then astronomers had become a little more conservative about how bright it would be on February 24th, when it passed by Earth at a distance of about 61,000,000 km (38,000,000 miles). With a little luck, they predicted, you might barely spot this interloper with your unaided eyes in a very dark sky.
We astronomers love a great comet, but we all knew Comet Lulin — while satisfying — was never going to be the showstopper that, say, Comet McNaught became in early 2007. If you don't remember McNaught, that's because it blazed to prominence and put on a spectacular show — but only for viewers in the Southern Hemisphere.
Now, it's been a cold, snowy winter here in New England, and this ex-Californian has a hard time getting out to observe when there's danger of becoming frozen to one's telescope. (Honestly, I don't know how my Canadian fellow blogger Alan Dyer does it.) But I felt compelled to at least seek out Comet Lulin as it cruised passed Earth. So last night I shivered my way outside with binoculars and a small telescope to track it down.
As the chart here shows, I knew that finding the comet would be a snap, thanks to its fortuitous positioning between Saturn and the bright star Regulus. (The comet's positions are marked for the evening of each date in the Americas, and the view is oriented as it would appear from North America.)
But I didn't see Lulin's telltale smudge when I swept the area with binoculars, thanks to a dome of light pollution from Boston, 30 km (20 miles) to my southeast. So I switched to my trusty telescope, a modest reflector with a 4½-inch-wide mirror. Aha! No problem this time!
Still, all I saw was a soft fuzzy glow. I couldn't make out the comet's two noteworthy tails, one of dust and the other of ionized gas. Nor did I detect the comet's eerie greenish glow that has been so obvious in photographs. Human eyes don't perceive color in dim light, I kept telling myself.
I waited a couple more hours to let Comet Lulin climb higher in the sky and farther from Boston's light pollution. This time I had no trouble picking it up in the binoculars, and the telescopic view showed a satisfying brightening at its center. But I still couldn't make out the tail, and I muttered not-so-nice things about the artificial glow that was spoiling my view.
The following night, fellow blogger Rick Fienberg did his best to photograph Comet Lulin from Phillips Academy Observatory in Massachusetts using an Orion 80-mm refractor and a Canon 20Da DSLR. This image approximates the eyeball view in binoculars or a small scope (except that you won't see any color). Rick's exposure was just 1 minute long ("If I exposed any longer," he told me, "the comet's nucleus turned from a dot into a line because it was moving so darned fast!")
So now it's your turn. Use the chart above, or the more detailed one here to find the comet, and then let me know (via a comment below) how it looked to you.
