If You Can Find Orion, You Can Find Comet Lovejoy

Friday, January 9, 2015

If You Can Find Orion, You Can Find Comet Lovejoy

If You Can Find Orion, You Can Find Comet Lovejoy:

The constellation Orion and Comet Lovejoy (C/2014 Q2), highlighted for easy viewing, as seen from Millersville, Maryland on January 7, 2015. Credit and copyright: Brian Moran.

Comet Lovejoy (2014 Q2) is now visible in the night sky, and while you’ll need binoculars or a low-power telescope to see it best, the perfect window of opportunity to see it for yourself is starting now! We’ve heard from some readers that they’ve had some trouble spying it, but photographer Brian Moran has snapped the perfect picture to show you EXACTLY where to look for the comet. All you need to do is look for the easy-to-find constellation of Orion, and swing your eyes to the right (about 20 degrees) and up slightly up.

Brian said he was having trouble finding Lovejoy, but perhaps it may have been because he was looking a little too close to Orion. “Orion is a great frame of reference, but all of the photos I saw online made it seem like it was closer to Orion than it actually is,” he said.

Comet Q2 Lovejoy is currently shining at 4th magnitude, and if you’ve got a really dark sky, you may be able to see it with the unaided eye. as our David Dickinson explained, this comet is now entering “prime time” evening sky viewing, as it is visible over the southern horizon at around 9:30 PM local time this weekend, then 8:00 PM on January the 15th, and just before 6:00 PM by January 31st.

Tonight (Thursday, January 8) we’ll have a “two-hour window of darkness between the end of twilight and moonrise for those of us in the world’s mid-northern latitudes. Each night after tonight the Moon rises nearly an hour later,” said Sky & Telescope’s Alan MacRobert.

Finder chart for Comet Lovejoy, C/2014 Q2, during January 2015. The dates are in Universal Time; the ticks are at 0:00 UT (7:00 p.m. on the previous date Eastern Standard Time). Click on the image for larger, print-friendly black-on-white PDF, courtesy of Sky & Telescope.

While C/Q2 Lovejoy passed closest to Earth yesterday (January 7) at a distance of 0.47 a.u. (44 million miles; 70 million km), the comet should remain at about the same brightness as it crosses the sky into Taurus, Aries, and Triangulum, higher and higher in early evening. It will pass 8° west-southwest of the Pleiades on the evening of January 17th.

MacRobert also explained that although the comet is beginning to recede from us, its intrinsic brightness should still be increasing a bit. “That’s because it doesn’t reach perihelion (its closest to the Sun) until January 30th (at a rather distant 1.29 a.u. from the Sun),” he said. “By that date the comet should finally be fading slightly from Earth’s point of view. And in late January the Moon returns; it’s first-quarter on the 26th.”

Here are some great images of Comet Lovejoy taken by Universe Today readers. Be sure to check out our Flickr group for more great images! We have nearly 1,500 members and new photos are added every day. And if you take an astrophoto, join our group and submit your photos! We may use your image in an upcoming article!

A wide-angle shot of Comet Lovejoy 2014 Q2 above snow-covered trees. Taken as it neared Orion on January 6, 2014. Credit and copyright: Marion Haligowski.

C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy on 7th January 2015. A couple of satellites managed to sneak in the image, too! Credit and copyright: JP Willinghan.

Comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy Passes Messier 79 Narrowfield C False Color, taken on Dec 29, 2014, from New Mexico Skies using a 43-cm CDK telescope and STXL-6303 camera on a PME II mount. Credit and copyright: Joseph Brimacombe.

A monochrome image of Comet Lovejoy (2014 Q2) taken on December 31, 2014. Credit and copyright: Damian Peach.

Comet Lovejoy, as seen on December 29, 2014 at around 12.30AM SGT from Singapore. Also visible is spiral galaxy NGC1886, seen to the left of the coma. Total exposure time is 12 minutes. Credit and copyright: Justin Ng.

Comet Lovejoy as seen from Aldalucia, Spain on December 30, 2013. Credit and copyright: Ian Sharp.

Comet Lovejoy Passing Globular Cluster M-79. Credit and copyright: Greg Redfern.

A two-part panorama of Comet 2014 Q2 Lovejoy as seen from Payson, Arizona on December 27, 2014. Credit and copyright: Chris Schur

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the United States government agency responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.

UFO SIGHTINGS PHOTO PHOTOGRAPHY

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a UFO as "An unidentified flying object; a 'flying saucer'." The first published book to use the word was authored by Donald E. Keyhoe. The acronym "UFO" was coined by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book, then the USAF's official investigation of UFOs. He wrote, "Obviously the term 'flying saucer' is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short." Other phrases that were used officially and that predate the UFO acronym include "flying flapjack", "flying disc", "unexplained flying discs", "unidentifiable object", and "flying saucer". The phrase "flying saucer" had gained widespread attention after the summer of 1947. On June 24, a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier. Arnold timed the sighting and estimated the speed of discs to be over 1,200 mph (1,931 km/h). At the time, he described the objects' shape as being somewhat disc-like or saucer-like, leading to newspaper accounts of "flying saucers" and "flying discs". In popular usage the term UFO came to be used to refer to claims of alien spacecraft. and because of the public and media ridicule associated with the topic, some investigators prefer to use such terms as unidentified aerial phenomenon (or UAP) or anomalous phenomena, as in the title of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP).

UFO PHOTO PHOTOGRAPHY

UFO - Unidentified Flying Object An unidentified flying object, or UFO, in its most general definition, is any apparent anomaly in the sky that is not identifiable as a known object or phenomenon. Culturally, UFOs are associated with claims of visitation by extraterrestrial life or government-related conspiracy theories, and have become popular subjects in fiction. While UFOs are often later identified, sometimes identification may not be possible owing to the usually low quality of evidence related to UFO sightings (generally anecdotal evidence and eyewitness accounts). Stories of fantastical celestial apparitions have been told since antiquity, but the term "UFO" (or "UFOB") was officially created in 1953 by the United States Air Force (USAF) to serve as a catch-all for all such reports. In its initial definition, the USAF stated that a "UFOB" was "any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object." Accordingly, the term was initially restricted to that fraction of cases which remained unidentified after investigation, as the USAF was interested in potential national security reasons and/or "technical aspects" (see Air Force Regulation 200-2). During the late 1940s and through the 1950s, UFOs were often referred to popularly as "flying saucers" or "flying discs". The term UFO became more widespread during the 1950s, at first in technical literature, but later in popular use. UFOs garnered considerable interest during the Cold War, an era associated with a heightened concern for national security. Various studies have concluded that the phenomenon does not represent a threat to national security nor does it contain anything worthy of scientific pursuit (e.g., 1951 Flying Saucer Working Party, 1953 CIA Robertson Panel, USAF Project Blue Book, Condon Committee).

Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Photos of Nature | Nature Photography What is The Universe

Friday, January 9, 2015