Bagging Comet SWAN

Posted by Kelly Whitt Oct 6, 2006

October 5, 2006, marks the date of my son's first look at a real comet. I wrote an article about new Comet SWAN and last night we finally had clear skies to allow us a peek. Even though the recommendation at the moment is to try to spot the comet in the morning hours before sunrise, I knew that the comet was above my horizon after sunset and thought that if I were persistent I could catch the little fuzzy ball between the end of sunset's glow and when it set for the evening.

C/2006 M4, also known as Comet SWAN, is lying below Cor Caroli, a bright star in Canes Venatici in the evening sky. It was not all that hard to find, but I did need my telescope. It is supposed to be bright enough to catch in binoculars, but because I was looking in the still darkening evening sky, my telescope was required. (I use a 4-inch reflector.) If you try to go out and look in the evening, simply find the Big Dipper first. Then look below the handle of the dipper to the only bright star in the area at magnitude 2.8. This is Cor Caroli. Aim your telescope at Cor Caroli and slowly scan down until the faint fuzzy comes into view.

I started out with binoculars but might have been too eager to get out there and get a peek. At first I saw nothing but the milky post-sunset sky. I kept coming back every few minutes (during commercials from my TV show) and tried again. Finally I hauled out the telescope and there it was. It was not very bright at all and I could see no tail or color to it. It was simply a larger (compared to stars) spot in the sky that was a lighter gray than the rest of the sky. Frankly, it was one of the least exciting comets I have seen and I hesitated bringing my five-year-old son out to see it as his first comet. But he already knew what I was doing and when I came back in he asked if I had found it and I told him the truth. So I am hoping that it will continue to brighten and look better in the telescope or even binoculars, perhaps even making its tail visible when it makes a better appearance in the evening sky in late October.

Looking at objects such as this comet or the Andromeda Galaxy, which, in binoculars and most telescopes, look like faint fuzzies that are not terribly different from each other nor all that exciting, makes me think about how strange it is that the night sky looks so uniform. If you look up on any given night you see a blanket of darkness punctuated by points of light that only vary slightly in their brightness. But the actual collection of objects in the sky, from planets to double stars to comets to galaxies to globular clusters.... there is such an array of sizes and composition and distances from us, and almost none of this is relayed by a simple glance at the night sky. The night sky holds many secrets, and it is only those who paid close attention and studied the depths of space who began to see the wonderfully complex universe we live in. With a little patience and some guidance, we too can begin to see the vast array of gems hidden in the sky.