{"id":801,"date":"2020-07-19T05:07:25","date_gmt":"2020-07-19T12:07:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bcmeteors.net\/?p=801"},"modified":"2020-07-19T05:07:25","modified_gmt":"2020-07-19T12:07:25","slug":"comet-neowise-visible-in-july","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bcmeteors.net\/?p=801","title":{"rendered":"Comet NeoWise Visible in July"},"content":{"rendered":"

Comet Neowise is bright and now easy to see.\u00a0 I took this photo by Ft. Steele on Tuesday morning at 1:30am.\u00a0 To see the comet, I’d recommend to go between midnight when it gets fully dark, until 3:30am when the Northern sky brightens with dawn.\u00a0 Otherwise the faint streak of the comet is difficult to see against the glowing sky.\u00a0 Binoculars make it brighter and allow you to see the pale-blue ion tail and pale-yellow dust tail, but it’s clearly visible by eye.<\/p>\n

\"Neowise
Comet Neowise July 14, 2020 from Fort Steele BC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The photo shows Comet Neowise, looking North from Ft. Steele on Tuesday around 1:30am.\u00a0 Lakit Mountain to the bottom right side with constellation Auriga hidden behind it, Capella the bright star there.\u00a0 It was taken through a 28mm wide-angle lens.\u00a0 The green glow along the horizon is the Northern Lights, which were slightly active that night.\u00a0 According to NOAA,\u00a0on their 9-point Kp scale it was a minor geomagnetic storm level 3.<\/p>\n

\"Comet
Comet Neowise, Thurs Jul 16 at 2am from Fort Steele BC.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Here\u2019s the comet two days later, on Thursday morning at 2am.\u00a0 Looking at the background stars, notice it\u2019s shifted slightly upwards and to the left from the first photo.\u00a0 Photographed with a more sensitive 28mm f\/1.8 lens.\u00a0 The comet looks a bit brighter, a white nucleus at bottom, with a pale-blue ion-jet going straight up, as well as a wide pale-yellow dust tail curving back.\u00a0 Again, along the bottom right you can see Lakit Mountain with trees silhouetted in the red glow of the lights of Ft. Steele.<\/p>\n

\"Comet
Comet Neowise Jul 16 zoomed in with 210mm Lens.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To take comet photos you’ll need about a 10 to 20 second exposure with a SLR camera on a tripod.\u00a0 (A cell phone would be a challenge.)\u00a0 This magnified photo was taken on a motorized equatorial tripod so the stars don\u2019t make streaks as the Earth rotates.<\/p>\n

Info about Comet NEOWISE C\/2020 F3<\/b><\/p>\n

Location<\/b>: It’s currently on the Northern horizon, to the left of the constellation Auriga, in Lynx, and will slowly move higher and to the left through the feet of Ursa Major (beneath the Big Dipper asterism) over the next few weeks. It went around the Sun on July 3, inside the orbit of Mercury at 0.29 AU and it’s now moving out and away.\u00a0\u00a0 It will be closest to Earth within 64 million miles (103 million kilometers) on July 23.<\/p>\n

The comet\u2019s tail<\/b>: The tail generally points away from the Sun.\u00a0 (It doesn\u2019t trace out the orbital path the comet is taking as many people assume, sometimes (after perihelion) the tail can point in the opposite direction that it is going.)\u00a0\u00a0The Coma<\/b>: is created when the heat of the sun melts the frozen ices and dust of the nucleus, which evaporates and lifts off the surface into a globular fog around the ice and dirt. There are various ices: water ice (H2O), dry ice (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO), methane (CH4) and ammonia (NH3). Carbon monoxide ionizes the easiest. \u00a0\u00a0The Ion Tail<\/b>: is the thin vertical pale-blue straight line in the photo, which is made up of carbon monoxide gases ionized by the Sun\u2019s intense UV light and is pushed directly away from the Sun by its solar wind, along the Sun\u2019s magnetic field streamlines.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very hot plasma that glows with a pale-blue light. \u00a0Sodium Tail<\/b>: not visible in the photograph, it has a red separation in the tail caused by high amounts of sodium, which also ionizes easily.\u00a0 \u00a0Dust Tail:<\/b>\u00a0The broad and fuzzy curved pale-yellow tail in the photo. These dust grains and sublimated ice vapours (like steam) are pushed away from the coma by the Sun\u2019s slight radiation pressure.\u00a0 The dust tail curves as it is pulled by gravity along the orbit behind the comet, and smaller dust grains get pushed faster by sunlight than the bigger and heavier dust grains.\u00a0The vapours and dust reflect the bright sunlight.\u00a0 The comet is losing hundreds of kilograms of material every minute and will get smaller as weeks go by.\u00a0 It should remain visible for a few weeks.<\/p>\n

\n

Why the name<\/b>\u00a0NEOWISE C\/2020 F3?<\/b>\u00a0\u00a0The comet was discovered by NASA\u2019s orbiting space telescope, the\u00a0N<\/b>ear-E<\/b>arth\u00a0O<\/b>bject\u00a0W<\/b>ide-field Infrared\u00a0S<\/b>urvey\u00a0E<\/b>xplorer, or NEOWISE, on March 27, 2020.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

How big is it?<\/b>\u00a0 NASA says:\u00a0“From its infrared signature, we can tell that it is about 5 kilometers [3 miles] across, and by combining the infrared data with visible-light images, we can tell that the comet’s nucleus is covered with sooty, dark particles left over from its formation near the birth of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago,”\u00a0said Joseph Masiero, NEOWISE deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.<\/p>\n

\"Location
Location of Comet Neowise plotted until July 26<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n
I made up this skychart in Cartes du Ciel using data from the minor planet center.net.\u00a0 In the starmap you can see Ursa Major (the Big Dipper) at upper left.\u00a0 The comet drifts left along the feet of Ursa Major.\u00a0 It should remain visible along the Northern horizon until Jul 26.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
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If you get a chance, take 50mm binoculars and try to spot the pale-blue ion tail and the pale-yellow dust tail.\u00a0 Otherwise it’s clearly visible by eye for a few weeks.<\/p>\n

Rick Nowell<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Comet Neowise is bright and now easy to see.\u00a0 I took this photo by Ft. Steele on Tuesday morning at 1:30am.\u00a0 To see the comet, I’d recommend to go between midnight when it gets fully dark, until 3:30am when the Northern sky brightens with dawn.\u00a0 Otherwise the faint streak of the comet is difficult to … Continue reading “Comet NeoWise Visible in July”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meteor-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcmeteors.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcmeteors.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcmeteors.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcmeteors.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcmeteors.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=801"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bcmeteors.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":819,"href":"https:\/\/bcmeteors.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801\/revisions\/819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcmeteors.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcmeteors.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcmeteors.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}