On Facebook my friend Elwood asked: See anything new up there after all this time?
Yes hubble telescope! I always missed it due too clouds or being too tired to wait up for it. Lately I have been tracking it online as well as my Starry Night software. and now I have finally seen it. Also a few supernovas I have never seen before.
What a great question.
August 20th of this year I was outside on a nice night determined to hunt down and observe Comet Jacques c2014 e2 and I found it, it just starting it's path across Cassiopeia. wow it was a bright little thing in my 12 inch Dobsonian scope.
I first observed it with my 26mm eyepiece, then used my 2x Barlow lens to go into a deeper view of it. Just to really absorb the comet and what I was observing I wrote some words down earlier in the day, stuck the piece of paper in my pocket and pulled it out at the scope and read the following: "Comet Jacques, a distant visitor from the Oort cloud". Then I looked at the comet again. Very amazing to look at a visitor from the Oort cloud in the backyard.
Mind boggling thinking of where it came from and how far it traveled to where it is at this moment at my scope. Especially how far! Has any one else viewed it?
Even though the cold winter has set in I have been out here and there but tonight I will be going deep. It is a blessing to look at the stars and not down at your feet.
Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe so fascinating, be curious!
1 comment:
I'm not sure if I observed Jacques or not. For some reason, I don't observe many comets, even though my favorite part of observing is when I get to see real time motion in our solar system, like the Transit of Venus, the motion of the Galilean Moons, or sunrise or sunset on a lunar crater. When I've observed comets, it's usually easy to see them move against the background stars during a night, and from night to night. I need to start observing more comets when I can.
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