Comet NEAT, a Lunar Eclipse, and the Endless Dance of the Planets

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May 1, 2004

Well, the moon interferes with the eta Aquarid meteor shower, so we won't bother with that.

Um, Comet C/2001 Q4 NEAT is nearest the Earth on the 6th, and at perihelion on the 15th, during a New Moon. Comets, of course, are always difficult to predict, no matter how much we think we know, (Anybody remember comet Kohoutek in 1973?) but comet NEAT just may be a decent naked eye object.

It was discovered August 24, 2001, thanks to the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking Program. The comet is unusual for its nearly perpendicular retrograde orbit. It began the year in the constellation Indus, more than 50⁰ south of the sun. It will eventually pass through the Big Dipper, leaving us on a path through the northern constellations. At its brightest, it may be as bright as Vega, which is misleading because it is a smeared smudge of a comet, not a brilliant point of starlight.

On May 10th it crosses the celestial equator, passing Procyon on the 11th. By the end of the month, when it is in the Great Bear, its daily motion will have slowed, and it will be fading. It may remain a naked-eye object into July, so get out your star charts for this and plot its daily motion against the stars.

Lessee what else we have in May ... if you are in central Asia or just about anywhere in Africa, you will get to see a Total Lunar Eclipse on the 4th in its entirety. If you are in the good ol' U S of A, you will get to read about it in the paper.

May, like the months preceding it, is a dance floor beneath the soft shoe shuffles of the planets. Mercury, at greatest western elongation on the 14th, puts on a nice morning show for the southern hemisphere, not so great for us in the north. Venus, shining at its very brightest magnitude -4.5, sets about 3 and ½ hours after sunset at the beginning of the month, and only about an hour afterward on the 31st. Watch for it to brush past Beat Tauri the first few days of the month, and remember that next month it does something it hasn't done for us Earth-bound observers since 1882 ... I'll leave ya hangin'.

Mars, just about as dim as it gets at magnitude +1.7, sails across the Twins with its sights set on Saturn. On the 10th it is about midway along a line that connects it with Saturn on one end, Venus on the other. The red planet passes within less than a degree of the star Epsilon Geminorum. (How many of you remember its breathtaking occultation of that star in April 1976?) And on the 24th it blows kisses at Saturn from a distance of about 1 and ½⁰.