Amateur astronomers the world over have been stunned and amazed by the weirdest new object to appear in the sky in memory. And it's one of the brightest, too — it's easy to spot with your eyes alone if you know where to look.
On October 24th, periodic Comet Holmes brightened dramatically — by nearly a million times — virtually overnight. For no apparent reason, the comet erupted from a very dim magnitude 17 to about magnitude 2½. Within a day its starlike nucleus had expanded into a perfectly round, bright little disk visible in binoculars and telescopes. It looked like no comet ever seen.Its startling outburst, however, has a precedent.
The comet was also in a major eruption 115 years ago, in November 1892, when English amateur Edwin Holmes was the first to spot it. It reached 4th or 5th magnitude, faded in the following weeks, and then underwent a second eruption 2½ months after the first.
Now, it seems, Comet Holmes has outdone itself. The first person to notice something happening, was A. Henriquez Santana at Tenerife, Canary Islands, shortly after midnight on the morning of the 24th local time.
If you haven't seen it yet, step outside after dinner tonight, and look for a narrow triangle of stars below the (sideways) W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia, but above (and slightly to the right of) the bright star Capella - the brightest in that part of the sky. Holmes is the "star" on the left side of the base of that triangle.
But trust me - it's easier just to scan the sky below Cassiopeia with your binoculars. Holmes stands out because it is NOT just a pinpoint of light like a star. It's a striking gray blob, a fuzz ball. And it really is hard to miss. Or at least it has been all this week.
Unlike most bright comets, Holmes doesn't possess a long tail. It looks just like a modestly bright star, so you'll need to use the finder chart to zero in on it. Even large telescopes reveal no details. The comet currently lies 150 million miles (245 million km) from Earth and 225 million miles (365 million km) from the Sun.
No one knows how long the outburst will last. When London observer Edwin Holmes discovered the comet in November 1892, it was also in an outburst and some 100,000 times brighter than it normally is. During that appearance, the comet faded 3 magnitudes in the course of a week.
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