Day 18: ‘Comet of Cooperation’ in pre-dawn sky
If you’re in a part of the country where winter’s chill has abated, you might want to indulge a backyard glimpse at the sky in the coming weeks. Comet Lulin, a strange new visitor to the inner planets, has probably been jostled from its home at the outer edges of the solar system, far beyond Pluto and a third of the way to the nearest star.
“It’s one of these comets that has been out there probably for several billion years,” said NASA astronomer Donald Yeomans, who took a few minutes to tell me how to best glimpse Lulin in the coming weeks. He said Lulin was likely “preturbed by either a passing star or gravitational tugs by the galaxy itself,” in order to get pushed close enough to orbit the Sun.
Later this month, Lulin will approach Earth closely enough to be visible with the naked eye where city lights don’t obscure the view. After that, it will buzz the Sun, figuratively speaking, and then travel out to the far-flung reaches of its orbit, not returning for millions of years.
If Lulin is indeed a pristine comet (never before scorched by the Sun), the sublimation of Lulin’s icy head should make for a bright spectacle.
Worth setting the alarm for, I’d say. And Mom, don’t worry about not having that new telescope yet. This one will be easy to spot with binoculars, and possibly even the naked eye.
A profile of the comet including a couple of finding charts has been posted here, but if you’re anything like me, those won’t help much (what, no Big Dipper on those maps?). Now through the last half of February, the comet will be heading from the vicinity of the constellation Virgo, where it is now, toward Leo.
At its closest approach on Feb. 24, Lulin will be visible in the sky almost all night, rising after dusk and setting near dawn. By midnight on the 24th in New York City, you’ll want to look east/southeast 31 degrees above the horizon, or midway up in the sky. If you’re in Los Angeles, the comet will appear south/southeast and about 60 degrees from the horizon — twice as high. The view will be best in the early morning hours in either the east or the west, as the comet will be rising throughout the night and appear highest in the sky in the wee hours of the morning.
After Feb. 24, Lulin will travel away from Earth, and will probably lose some of its flair — although it will remain visible through binoculars and modest telescopes as late as early March, as it crosses the constellation Leo. With decent telescopes, Lulin will be observable roughly until mid-May.
In honor of the fact that 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, I’ll end with a heartwarming tidbit about Lulin’s shared discovery, from Sky and Telescope:
Comet C/2007 N3 (Lulin) was discovered by Quanzhi Ye, a student (age 19) at Sun Yat-sen University in mainland China, as an apparently asteroidal object on images taken by Chi Sheng Lin (National Central University, Taiwan) with a 16-inch telescope at Lulin Observatory in Taiwan on the night of July 11, 2007. A week later, confirming images revealed the telltale presence of a coma. In China and Taiwan, the comet has been hailed as the “Comet of Cooperation.”
