Tag Archives: Comet Lovejoy

Comet Lovejoy pokes its head above Arizona’s horizon

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Multiple time exposure pictures were "stacked" together to make this deep image of Comet Lovejoy. Some of the "black snow" is camera noise, much of it is very faint stars. The bright star Sirius is at upper right. Click image to see Rob's nice website devoted to the comet. Credit: Rob Kaufman

A question from a reader this morning stirred me to post this update on Comet Lovejoy, the great sungrazing comet of 2011. While the brightest part of the tail near the nearly-vanished head of the comet is now visible from the southern U.S., it’s exceedingly faint. I know of only one observer at this time who has succeeded in seeing it – Alan Hale, co-discoverer of one of the best known comets of our time, Comet Hale-Bopp. Twice this past week he used a 16-inch telescope to eke out the extremely faint glow of the comet’s head / tail. His first observation was made Sunday night:

“I had excellent sky conditions right down to the horizon. There definitely seemed to be an extremely pale and vague glow — not much more than a brightening of the background sky, but it seemed to be real.  It almost precisely followed the expected rate and direction of motion during the 1 1/2 hours that I followed it,” wrote Hale in an e-mail today.

He spotted the same faint glow last night (25th) moving in the same direction. Both times Hale estimated its brightness at 12.0, but because the comet’s light was so spread out, it was much more difficult to see than a typical smaller 12th magnitude comet.

Comet Lovejoy in its glory days photographed from Australia on Dec. 26, 2011. Credit: Rob Kaufman

From the southern hemisphere, where Comet Lovejoy is much higher in the sky, amateur astronomer and comet discoverer David Seargent spotted it with large 25 x 100  and 15 x 80 binoculars on Sunday the 22nd. His description matches Hale’s – a very faint glow. Meanwhile, astrophotographer Rob Kaufman of Australia pushed his camera equipment to the limit to record an impossibly faint 26-degree long tail. His picture (above) is a negative image to better show the contrast between comet and sky. What’s cool about the photo is that the tail pokes north almost to Sirius in the constellation Canis Major, stars widely visible from anywhere in the U.S. and southern Canada.

Pity that the better part of the tail is simply too dim to be seen with naked eye, binoculars or telescope. Unless you live in the far southern U.S. and have a moderate to large telescope, your chances of seeing Lovejoy are rapidly diminishing if only because the moon’s phase is waxing.

Comet Lovejoy on Dec. 22, 2011 reflected in water. Credit: Colin Legg

Bright moons kill faint comets. By the time Comet Lovejoy is high enough to be better placed for viewing in the mid-northern states next week, the moon will be on its way to full, making it impossible for anyone to spot it.

When the moon finally departs the early evening sky around Feb. 9, many amateur astronomers will be out for one last try at a visual observation. I’ll be among them. Even though Lovejoy will continue moving farther from Earth and fading in the coming weeks, I remain hopeful.

If you live in Arizona, Florida and other southern regions of the U.S. and Central America, now’s the time to seize the opportunity.

First-ever picture of a black hole in the works

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Comet Lovejoy cruises by the Large Magellanic Cloud, the largest, brightest satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, on January 13. Credit: Rob Kaufman

Lovejoy, the little comet that beat the odds and survived its swing around the sun last month, still shows a sleek cometary form, but it’s barely visible anymore with the naked eye. Amateur astronomers like to joke that they saw an object at the threshold of visibility using a technique called “averted imagination”, a reference to averted vision, which really can help you see a faint object more clearly by not staring straight at it.

Comet Lovejoy’s tail still shows up in long time exposure photos as a long, wispy streak. Depending on the darkness of the sky and lens used, amateurs have recorded tails lengths of between 20 and 37 degrees this week. The comet continues heading northward in the coming days and will finally become visible a week from now for residents in the far southern U.S. in places like Tucson, New Orleans and Key West. On January 22 at 9 p.m. it will be just 5 degrees high due south in the constellation Pictor the Painter’s Easel  from southern Arizona. Hopefully, we’ll still be able to see some of it with binoculars without having to use averted imagination. For a recent NASA update on Lovejoy, click HERE.

A computer simulation of superheated plasma swirling around the black hole at the center of our galaxy. The dark shadow at center is what astronomers hope to finally see. Image by Scott Noble/RIT

Astronomers and physicists from around the world will gather in Tucson, Arizona on January 18 for a conference on the first coordinated endeavor to spy a black hole using the Event Horizon Telescope. Although there’s lots of circumstantial evidence for black holes, no one’s ever seen or photographed one. Despite their enormous masses, most are quite small. The dark shadow of a typical black hole, called the event horizon, measures only about 20 miles in diameter. Larger ones called supermassive black holes contain millions of solar masses and lurk in the centers of many galaxies including the Milky Way. Those can be up to a billion miles across or about the distance of Saturn from the sun. The one in our galaxy contains about 2.6 million times the mass of the sun and is estimated to be no more than 93 million miles across or nearly equal that of Earth’s distance from the sun.

The UA Submillimeter Telescope on Mt. Graham is one of the many radio telescopes forming the Earth-sized Event Horizon Telescope. Credit: Dave Harvey/UA Steward Observatory

Even a 93-million-mile wide shadow is a small thing when seen from Earth’s vantage point 26,000 light years from the galactic center. It’s been likened to spotting a grapefruit on the moon. To see something that small, you need a gigantic telescope. That’s why the new Event Horizon”telescope” will be a combination of 50 existing radio telescopes around the globe to form one monster virtual scope the size of Earth. Utterly cool idea. Data from each instrument will be carefully combined in a central processing center to create the images. Radio was chosen over optical telescopes because radio waves can penetrate the dust and other star gunk between us and the galactic center.

According the University of Arizona press release, participating in the project are the Submillimeter Telescope on Mt. Graham in Arizona, telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the Combined Array for Reasearch in Millimeter-wave Astronomy in California. The global array will include several radio telescopes in Europe, a 10-meter dish at the South Pole and potentially a 15-meter antenna atop a 15,000-foot peak in Mexico.

The supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy is the target of the Event Horizon Telescope. Two views of the Milky Way are shown: face-on from above and edge-on from the side. The solar system is some 26,000 light years from the center.

The Milky Way’s black hole is an ideal candidate because it’s large and relatively close by. Although there are bigger black holes out there, they’re in other galaxies and much too far away. Of course, scientists want to do more than just take a picture. They hope to study the hot, glowing matter swirling around the hole right up until it disappears at the event horizon. Dust and stars that stray near a black hole can end up like water going down your bathtub drain. The material is heated to incandescence through friction as its swirls its way to oblivion. They’d also like to know if the prediction made by Einstein’s Relativity Theory that the event horizon is circular is correct.

It’s an exciting project and I’ll bet you’re as eager as I am to see the first photo of a black hole.

Comet Lovejoy’s fading glory

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Comet Lovejoy is the long, faint streak to the right of the Milky Way in a photo taken on January 2 from Bright, Victoria, Australia. The Coal Sack dark nebula and Southern Cross are at middle left. Alpha and Beta Centauri at lower left. Credit: Rob Kaufman

Time to check in on the wonder that is Comet Lovejoy. Though still too far south to see at mid-northern latitudes, the comet remains a fading spectacle for skywatchers down under. Various observers have reported tail lengths of 25 to more than 40 degrees – that’s twice the height of the constellation Orion.

Much of that has only been visible with averted vision, a technique of looking off to the side rather than directly at a faint object, under very dark skies. According to Rob McNaught, the brightest part of the comet is a 10-degree section some 10 degrees up from the comet’s extremely faint head. Most of the tail is now fainter than the Milky Way.

Lovejoy is currently circumpolar for Australia, meaning that it’s close enough to the south celestial pole star (the southern hemisphere’s version of our North Star) that it never sets. The Big Dipper and Cassiopeia are circumpolar for the northern United States and Canada. That’s given skywatchers plenty of time to see it in a dark sky in the early morning hours after moonset. Soon however the moon will be full and light up the sky all night. I suspect Comet Lovejoy will rapidly become invisible or nearly so with the naked eye even from dark sites in the next few nights.

In the top image photographer Rob Kaufman tracked the stars' movement using a motorized mount. In this one, he opened the shutter and let the stars trail during the time exposure. Now you can see how the stars circle about the dim star Sigma Octans - the southern pole star - near the center of the "whirlpool". Credit: Rob Kaufman

Despite it being very faint, the comet still has a head, which implies there might still be some dust boiling off the comet’s core or nucleus. There’s speculation among comet observers that after fresh ice was exposed during its close passage to the sun, a new insulating layer of dust and ice has shut down activity since. On the other hand, since no nucleus is visible down to 19th magnitude, maybe it really is gone, with its remnants broken into tiny, invisible bits that went into seeding its vast tail.

If Lovejoy can hold together a while longer, folks in places like Tucson and Key West should start seeing part of the comet’s tail in the southern evening sky after the moon departs the scene around mid-month.

Shadows of spruce trees in moonlight pattern the snowy road beneath Orion last night. Details: 16mm lens at f/3.2, ISO 1600 and 20 second exposure. Photo: Bob King

Did you catch the moon and Jupiter last night? What a sight the two made together over the rooftops. Moonlight and starlight were in perfect balance for some nighttime photography. Sure, the temperature at my place was -5 F, but I couldn’t resist taking the camera out for few pictures of Orion, favorite constellation of photographers. If you have a tripod and the ability to take 15-30 second long time exposures, give it a try yourself sometime this week when the pizza pie moon shines brightly.

Don’t forget – tomorrow morning is the peak of the annual Quadrantid meteor shower. The Eastern half of the U.S and Canada are favored for the maximum number of meteors. Click back to yesterday’s blog for more details.

Flaming rocket upstages Santa; satellite falls on Cosmonaut Street

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Video showing the re-entry of the Soyuz rocked stage over Germany

A Russian Soyuz rocket stage used to lift a crew of three astronauts to the International Space Station last week burned up in spectacular fashion over Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and France on Christmas Eve at dusk as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere. Re-entering rocket stages and other man-made debris look nearly identical to flaming meteors, but there’s a difference. Meteors travel from 10-40 miles per second and flame out in a matter of seconds. Man-made space debris usually moves more slowly through the sky, because it’s scraping the upper atmosphere at less than 5 miles per second.  If you’re lucky enough to see a re-entry, the display can last up to 2-3 minutes.

Frame grab from another Youtube video of the Soyuz rocket burnup. Click to watch video

In unrelated development, the Russian communications satellite Meridian failed to reach orbit when launched on December 23 due to a failure in a Soyuz rocket. The satellite plummeted back to Earth just minutes later, landing in the Novosibirsk region of central Siberia. In a twist of irony that sounds more like a joke written for a late-night talk show host, a 20-inch spherical fragment of the satellite crashed into the roof of a home on Cosmonaut Street in the village of Vagaitsevo. Although Andrei Krivoruchenko and his wife were home at the time, no one was injured. By the way, many websites are confusing the satellite failure with the Christmas Eve Soyuz rocket stage re-entry. The two are not connected.

It’s been a long and difficult year for the Russian Roscosmos space program with the loss of five satellites, a Progress supply ship bound for the space station and the Phobos-Grunt Mars probe stuck in orbit and expected to fall back to Earth in mid-January. Even more worrying, with the end of the space shuttle program, the only ticket to the space station is aboard the Soyuz spacecraft propelled by similar Soyuz rocket boosters.Vladimir Popovkin, the head of Roscosmos, commented on Russian state television that the space industry was in crisis. He placed the blame on the loss of specialists from the program after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

John Burt looks at Comet Lovejoy through binoculars this morning (Dec. 26) from Gisborn, New Zealand. The photographer John Drummond estimated the tail at 27 degrees long and 3 degrees wide at the fainter end. No head was visible. Credit: John Drummond

Comet Lovejoy continues to make southern observers lose sleep every clear morning. I understand their sacrifice every time I see another photo of this fabulous object. Skywatchers across Australia and other southern hemispheric realms can spot the comet in the east in a dark sky before dawn.

Although the headless wonder has faded to around 4th magnitude, the tale has grown to 25 degrees or longer – taller than the outline of the constellation Orion – and remains easily visible. Northerners will have to wait about 4 weeks until Lovejoy shows up in the evening sky. More northern northerners like those of us in Minnesota won’t get our chance until the end of January-early February. I’ll take whatever scraps are left over just for the sake of “touching” this storied comet.

Don’t forget to keep an eye on the southwestern sky after sunset tonight December 26. As twilight deepens, Venus and a thin crescent moon will share the scene together – a beautiful sight.

Season’s greetings from Comet Lovejoy and the rest of the gang

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ESO optician Guillaume Blanchard captured this wide-angle photo of Comet Lovejoy just two days ago on December 22. Comet Lovejoy has been the talk of the astronomy community over the past few weeks. It was first discovered on 27 November by the Australian amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy . Click for a LARGE version. Credit: G. Blanchard / ESO

There are so many excellent photos out there of Comet Lovejoy, but this one, taken at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile stands out not only for the comet but for everything else it shows including the Milky Way’s two brightest companion galaxies, a famous dark nebula and the zodiacal light.

If you follow the Milky Way up to the right, the first dark patch you bump into is the Coal Sack, a prominent cloud of interstellar dust thick enough to block the more distant background stars. To the eye, it looks like a missing piece of the Milky Way. If stars were embedded in the nebula, their light would reflect off the dust and cause it to glow. Then we’d see it a bright, reflection nebula. Nearly touching the Coal Sack on the upper right is the compact, four-starred constellation Crux, better known as the Southern Cross.

The Coal Sack (left), is located 600 light years away within the Milky Way. The Southern Cross is outlined at right. Credit:ESO/S.Brunier

Now take a look to the lower right of the Milky Way between the two observatory  buildings. Those two fuzzy blobs are satellite galaxies of the Milky Way called the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds and only observable from southern latitudes. The Large Cloud is 160,000 light years away; the Small is 200,000.

To the left of the comet is a faint, finger-like glow called the zodiacal light. This is another cloud of dust but one created by generations of comets. Heated by the sun, a comet’s dirty, dusty ice vaporizes and is driven back to form a tail. Material from the tail is spread along the comet’s orbit and diffuses into a stream of dust over time.

With thousands of comets coming and going over the eons, dust has built up in the plane of the solar system. Illuminated by sunlight, we see it as a cone or finger of soft light at early dawn or dusk. The name ‘zodiacal’ tells us the dust is concentrated along the zodiac, a belt of sky that includes famous 12 constellations, which, you guessed it, is centered on the plane of the solar system.

Spectacular video of Comet Lovejoy from space station

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Comet Lovejoy is visible near Earth’s horizon in this nighttime photo by NASA astronaut Dan Burbank, Expedition 30 commander, onboard the International Space Station. The blue arch of morning twilight rims the Earth below the comet; the green band is airglow. Click photo for hi-res version. Credit: NASA

I was just made aware of this picture the moment I wrapped up today’s astro blog. Time to re-open the store! The photo was taken on December 21 from an altitude of about 240 miles. Is there a more eloquent statement about the beauty of our universe?

Now take a look at the video:

Comet Lovejoy’s tail might be visible from southern U.S.

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Part of Comet Lovejoy’s tail just might be visible low in the southeastern sky in the next few mornings from the far southern U.S. The sky is shown at 6:20 a.m. local time from Key West, Florida at latitude 24 degrees north. Although the comet’s head will be below the horizon at the time, some of the tail should stick above the horizon during twilight. Sunrise for Key West is 7:07 a.m. Tick marks show the comet’s position every five days. Created with SkyMap

Now that we know that Comet Lovejoy’s tail stretches nearly 15 degrees and is bright enough to be visible with the naked eye as well as easily photographed, I suspect skywatchers living in the far southern U.S. might be able to see at least part of the tail pushing up from their southeastern horizon before sunrise.

In the map above, the moon is shown for tomorrow morning the 22nd and the tail angle is approximate. Note that the sun is 10 degrees below the horizon at the time. Try using the moon to help guide you on where to look. And be sure to bring along binoculars. The extra light-gathering power can really help.

To make this observation you’ll need to be able to see straight down to the horizon and be blessed with extremely clear skies – no haze, no clouds, no nothing but transparent air. You’ll also need to make your attempt very soon as the comet is slipping farther south with each passing day. That means it’s sinking ever deeper below the horizon in the northern hemisphere at least for the time being.

While I suspect seeing Lovejoy’s tail will prove a great challenge, what a thrill it would be if you succeed. Back in January 2007, when another bright comet – McNaught 2006 P1 – was putting on a great show in the southern hemisphere, I was able to see the tops of several of its dust tails very faintly right here in Duluth. I wish we were luckier this time around. Lovejoy’s tail will only protrude a couple degrees above the horizon for the next few days in a very bright twilight sky for my locale.

If you’re struggling to see it with your eyes or binoculars, try taking some pictures with your camera. The comet has shown up very nicely in digital images lately even when faint to the eye. Use a wider angle lens and experiment with your exposures. Good luck and drop us an e-mail or comment if you see it.

Mercury, crescent moon, Comet Lovejoy make the dawn sparkle

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Comet Lovejoy's two tails rise at dawn this morning as seen from Western Australia. Details: 73mm lens at f/4, ISO 3200 and 12-second exposure. Click image to see an awesome video of the comet rising. Credit: Colin Legg

Just in time for Christmas, Comet Lovejoy is putting on a wonderful show for observers in the southern hemisphere this week. The two photos show the comet’s beautiful, feather-like tail standing high at dawn. Legg took three cameras with him this morning – one to make the time-lapse video and two for still shots. In his words:

“At around 3:10 (Australian time) the first hint of tail appeared above the trees, and by 3:15 I could see it visually. It stayed in clear view – non-averted vision – from then until around 4:10 (deep twilight). An awesome sight.”

Comet Lovejoy captured at dawn today from Brazil. Click image to see more photos and blog. Credit: Reginaldo Nazar

Others were out to see the marvel including Reginaldo Nazar of Curitiba, Brazil, who also took photos at dawn this morning. Many observers have pointed out and you can see for yourself that the head of the comet has become very faint, while the tail continues to hold its own. As Lovejoy moves ever higher into darker sky and the moon departs the scene, the tail should continue to dazzle for some time.

Compare the dramatic change in the comet's head and nucleus (bright spot) on Dec. 19 (left) and Dec. 21. Credit: Jakub Cerny, Jan Ebr, Martin Jelinek, Petr Kubanek, Michael Prouza and Michal Ringes

As the comet’s distance from the sun increases, that too will eventually fade. The rapid dimming of the head may indicate that the major portion of the comet – its nucleus – is nearly spent or perhaps broken apart. Two recent examples  of comets that “lost their heads” are Comet Elenin earlier this year and C/1999 S4 (LINEAR) in 2000. This normally happens when a comet is closest to the sun and the nucleus breaks apart in the solar heat. Perhaps the same has occurred post-perihelion with Comet Lovejoy. Or it might be that the comet has simply exhausted its material.

Chris Wyatt got some great shots of the Lovejoy' tail and faint head from Bendemeer, New South Wales, Australia on Dec. 22 Australian time today. He estimated the tail length at about 14 degrees. Credit: Chris Wyatt

Updated light curves, which are predictions on the brightness behavior of a comet, indicate that Lovejoy will be 6th magnitude or brighter through the end of the month. By the time it’s visible in the southern U.S. around January 20, it might still be magnitude 10 and visible in medium-sized telescopes.

The moon and planet Mercury are together at dawn Thursday morning Dec. 22. Created with Stellarium

I’m happy that southern observers have so much to look forward to at dawn. Even if northern hemisphereans can’t see the comet, we can still share in a fortunate pairing of a most delicate crescent moon and the planet Mercury tomorrow morning December 22. If you look very low in the southeastern sky about 45 minutes before sunrise, the moon will hover some 1o degrees (one fist at arm’s length) above the horizon. Mercury is a degree lower and 5 degrees to the moon’s left. Starved of starlight, I’m hoping to re-charge tomorrow morning with an elixir of moonlight, Mercury and spring stars.

Saturn-moon conjunction plus Comet Lovejoy’s a joy to behold

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The two-tailed Comet Lovejoy photographed remotely via computer control early yesterday morning from Malargue, Argentina by the Czech team of Jakub Cerny, Jan Ebr, Martin Jelinek, Petr Kubanek, Michael Prouza and Michal Ringes. The sun was just below the horizon when the picture was taken.

I just had to share this awesome comet photo taken yesterday morning. What a thing of beauty, as sleek as a tailfin on a ’59 Cadillac. A few amateur astronomers in Brazil and Australia are seeing the comet just before sunrise using binoculars. They report a tiny, bright head or coma and short, thin tail.  It’s currently around magnitude -1 or about as bright as Sirius.

The waning crescent moon is in conjunction with the planet Saturn tomorrow morning Dec. 20. This map shows the sky around 6 a.m.

Planning on being up tomorrow morning around 6? Take a look out the window toward the southeast and you’ll see the moon in conjunction with the planet Saturn with the bright star Spica nearby. Saturn now rises around 2:30 a.m. and is well up in the early dawn sky. Its brightest moon Titan, easily visible in any telescope, will lie just to the northwest of the planet.

Dione photographed by Cassini during last week's close pass. Beyond Dione's shadowed edge, the smaller moon Mimas orbits in the distance. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

While we’re on the topic, the Cassini spacecraft at Saturn made its closest pass yet of Dione (dye-OH-nee), a 697-mile-diameter moon with a thick crust of water ice, last Monday, coming within just 62 miles of its surface. This is one of many photos taken of the encounter. Click HERE to see more. The craters you see were made in ice, which at Saturn’s distance is as hard as rock.

If you put on a coat and step outside tomorrow, in addition to the nice conjunction, you can spot both the Chinese space station precursor satellite Tiangong 1 and the stubbornly uncommunicative Phobos-Grunt probe stuck in Earth orbit. Tiangong 1′s pass is a bright one; P-G’s is fainter but as long as you’re already outside, why not try anyway? Phobos-Grunt is expected to burn up in the atmosphere when it drops out  oforbit on January 11 plus or minus five days.

* Tiangong 1 starting at 5:57 a.m. when it leaves Earth’s shadow about two fists high in the southwestern sky traveling east. Passes beneath Saturn and the moon. Maximum brightness 1.5 – pretty bright!
* Phobos-Grunt spacecraft at 6:34 a.m. on a parallel track in the south but one fist higher up. Passes above Saturn and the moon. Maximum brightness 2.8.

The times above are for the Duluth, Minn. region. For times for your town, please log in to Heavens Above or key in your zip code at Spaceweather’s Satellite Flyby site.

I couldn’t resist adding a couple more photos of Comet Lovejoy. Two were taken by spacecraft while the third was made early this morning from Argentina. Enjoy!

Lovejoy can be seen in the lower left in this visible light photo taken by the Japanese Hinode spacecraft. Credit: JAXA/LMSAL

The comet's tail wriggles in this 4-frame sequence made in ultraviolet light by the STEREO-B spacecraft as the comet hurried away from the sun several days ago. The strange wriggles might be connected to magnetic fields in the sun's corona. Credit: NASA

An evocative image of Comet Lovejoy's tail rising shortly before the sun this morning Dec. 19. It was taken by the same Czech team described above using only a 200mm telephoto lens.

How to see Comet Lovejoy this winter; ISS evening flybys return

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Comet Lovejoy, now showing both dust and gas tails, departs from the sun in this photo taken last night by SOHO. I've taken the liberty of removing the artifacts or spikes from overexposure around the comet's head. Credit: Click photo for most recent image. NASA/ESA

I imagine some of you have read enough about C/2011 W3 Lovejoy. After all, I’ve been typing away about this comet all week! But I’d like to beg your indulgence to add yet another chapter to this evolving story.

Today the comet is just under 10 million miles from the sun and 85 million miles from Earth and rapidly headed south after its close graze with our star Thursday evening. According to W. Dean Pesnell, project scientist for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which tracked Lovejoy as it passed only 87,000 miles from the sun’s surface, only 10% of it remains. The rest – millions of tons of ice and dust – was vaporized or lost in the sun’s outer atmosphere or corona. As you saw in yesterday’s images, the heat- severed tail lingered for hours near the sun. The remainder of the comet re-emerged in Phoenix-like fashion as a brilliant “star” that soon sprouted two new tails as the sun’s heat vaporized fresh ice exposed during the disruption.

Comet Lovejoy's orbit is a narrow ellipse that only briefly cuts through the orbital plane of the planets before plunging below and away from the sun. When near the sun, its orbit was completely inside Mercury's orbit. Credit: NASA

While some sungrazing comets have rounded the sun and survived, they typically break up and most disappear. Some 2000 comets spotted with the SOHO coronagraph have been one-hit wonders never to be seen again. A few, like the famously bright Comet Ikeya-Seki in 1966, make it past perihelion but break into pieces as they exit. This may yet happen to Comet Lovejoy as it departs the solar glare. Many eyes will be watching.

One of the first images from the ground of Comet Lovejoy was taken this morning using a remote telescope in Malargue, Argentina by the Czech team of Jakub Cerny, Jan Ebr, Martin Jelinek, Petr Kubanek, Michael Prouza and Michal Ringes.

It’s fascinating to see that Comet Lovejoy is departing the sun’s vicinity as bright or brighter than when it entered. suspect it’s from fresh ices and dust exposed after being stripped of its dirty exterior by the blistering heat of the sun’s corona. Amateur astronomers observing and photographing from the southern hemisphere this morning are reporting the comet at magnitude -2 or -3 or about as bright as Jupiter.

So, will we see Lovejoy from our own front yards in the coming days? That depends on where you live and when you look. Today it’s a very small distance – several degrees – to the southwest or lower right of the sun. You might see it by blocking the sun with a building or power pole and then using binoculars while wearing sunglasses to carefully sweep the area for a pale white fuzzy spot. Just be sure you don’t accidentally look directly at the sun or you’ll damage your retinas.

This map shows the comet every 5 days in the morning sky seen from Sydney, Australia shortly before sunrise facing east-southeast. The sun is shown 2 degrees below the horizon. Created with Stellarium

As Lovejoy glides away from the sun in the next couple days, it will fade and become impossible to see or photograph in the daytime sky. That’s OK because skywatchers in the southern hemisphere are now beginning to spot the comet very low in the southeastern sky shortly before sunrise. Perhaps someone will even see the tail stick up like a feather from the horizon in mid-twilight similar to Comets West (1976) and Ikeya-Seki (1965).

Lovejoy moves higher into a darker sky with each passing morning, so expect more photos taken by amateur astronomers as well as regular reports about its brightness and behavior from the ground. Hopefully the comet won’t fade too quickly!

Comet Lovejoy every 5 days from Feb. 5 - March 21, 2012 as seen from Duluth, Minn. It will probably be very faint by this time. Created with SkyMap software

Observers living at mid-latitudes in the northern hemisphere won’t be able to catch a glimpse of the comet until early next year – if at all. Starting about the 23rd of January, it will appear very low in the constellation Pictor in the southern evening sky for observers in the far southern U.S. For places like Chicago, Minneapolis and Duluth, we’ll get our first look in early February, when Lovejoy inches up from Caelum through Lepus below the constellation Orion. How bright it will be by then is anybody’s guess. My guess is that you’ll need a good-sized telescope to see it, but I’d love to be wrong.

Before signing off, I want to alert you to a new series of evening passes of the International Space Station (ISS) that began late this week. I’ve listed times for the Duluth, Minn. region below. For times for your town click on Spaceweather’s Satellite Flybys or log in to Heavens Above.

* Tonight Dec. 17 starting at 5:44 p.m. low across the southern sky
* Sunday Dec. 18 at 6:23 p.m. Climbs up into the southwestern sky before disappearing into Earth’s shadow below the Great Square of Pegasus
* Monday Dec. 19 at 5:27 p.m. across the south
* Tuesday Dec. 20 at 6:06 p.m. A brilliant overhead pass but then disappears into Earth’s shadow after gliding through the W of Cassiopeia
* Wednesday Dec. 21 at 5:11 p.m. Nice high pass in the southern sky
* Thursday Dec. 22 at 5:51 p.m. Another brilliant pass, this time in the northern sky