There’s a mild Santa Ana condition, so some of the Southern California air crud has been blown out to sea and skies are dark and clear. Good time to go out and look up for this year’s celebrity, Comet 17P/Holmes. One of my Canadian twitterpals was talking about it weeks ago, but I knew the sight wouldn’t be as impressive here as in Saskatchewan.
So out I went before dinner, looking up towards Cassiopeia and then searching for Perseus. It’s a naked eye comet if you know where to look and after a few minutes with binoculars, there it was. Like the other comets I’ve seen, it was impressive and disappointing both at once. No tail, no color. Just a dim, round smudge in the sky as though God’s teacher had come by to inspect his work and poked a chalky finger on the firmament.
But impressive, still, when you think about how far away it is, and how big, and what a gift it is to be able to see this unpredictable brightening that changed overnight by a factor of a million. It’s the size of the moon’s orbit around earth and there’s no tail because we’re looking straight down through the comet’s nucleus.
It will be moving slowly through Perseus through the next few months. There’s no way to know when it will dim again, or if will flare up a second time. Go out, look up, and take it in while you can.