The Holmes Comet
(click the picture for a larger view)
Comet Holmes refuses to fade. The unusual comet that surprisingly brightened nearly a million-fold in late October continues to remain visible to the unaided eye from dark locations. Night to night, Comet 17P/Holmes is slowly gliding through the constellation Perseus, remaining visible to northern observers during much of the night right from sunset. The remarkable snowball continues to retain a huge coma, but now shows very little of a tail. How much longer Comet Holmes will remain visible to the unaided eye is unknown.
Here is a sky chart to help you find the comet in the night sky.
(click on the picture for a larger view)
Nobody knows why Holmes erupted, but it underwent a similar explosive brightening in 1892.
The recent display, which began Oct. 24, brought the comet from visual obscurity to being one of the brighter objects in the night sky. It has since dimmed somewhat as the material races outward from the nucleus at roughly 1,100 mph (0.5 km/sec).
The Hawaiian astronomy team writes in a press statement: "This amazing eruption of the comet is produced by dust ejected from a tiny solid nucleus made of ice and rock, only 3.6 kilometers (roughly 2.2 miles) in diameter."
The new image from the Hawaiian observatory also shows a modest tail forming to one side, now just a fuzzy region to the lower-right. That's caused by the pressure of sunlight pushing on the gas and dust of the coma. But the comet is so far away — 149 million miles (240 million kilometers), or about 1.6 times the distance from Earth to the Sun — that even Hubble can't resolve its nucleus.
The offset nature of the coma, seen in ground-based images, suggests "a large fragment broke off and subsequently disintegrated into tiny dust particles after moving away from the main nucleus," Hubble astronomers said in a statement Thursday. The comet's distance, plus all the dust, prevent Hubble from seeing any fragments, however.
Once this land was home to large herds of free range cats!
Watch the video below to see one of the great cat roundup's.
click for link to cat herding video
WoofAbby
