OathKeepingJarhead Admin
Posts : 490 Join date : 2012-09-05 Age : 41 Location : Southeastern Michigan
| Subject: COMET PAN-STARRS UPDATE Mon Feb 18, 2013 10:25 pm | |
| I'm not sure if we will end up being able to see this one in the northern hemisphere or not. I hope so. It is shaping up to be a nice looking comet. It will only get more beautiful as it approaches the sun and gets brighter. Source. - Quote :
- Comet Pan-STARRS (C/2011 L4), widely expected to become a naked-eye object in early March, is now closer to the sun than Venus. Solar heating is vaporizing the comet's icy core and creating a wide, fan-shaped tail visible through binoculars in the southern hemisphere. Ignacio Diaz Bobillo sends this picture from Buenos Aires, Argentina:
"I saw Comet Pan-STARRS just before daybreak in the constellation Grus," says Bobillo. "This is what it looked like through a small telescope, imaged with an exposure time of 8x2 minutes."
In early March, Comet Pan-STARRS will make its closest approach to the sun inside the orbit of Mercury; at that time it could brighten to easy naked-eye visibility. No one knows exactly what will happen, however, because it is a fresh comet being exposed to solar heating for the first time.
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