Comet McNaught III

Comet McNaught is only getting better (I procalaim as I sit under a blanket of clouds and peer into the sky restlessly hoping for the snow to stop and the sky to once again be blue) and remote viewing is pretty darn good when you have SOHO doing the looking for you. Below are two images from SOHO that show the comet and its brightness. I am guessing that it is now at about -1 mag? I can check this out, but it is a daytime object and that means it has passed a given threshold of brightness...just not sure specifically. It doesnt matter, really. The piintis that SOHO has some pretty neat stuff. Here they are:

The sun is (blocked out) in the middle and the comet is, need I say it, the bright thing in the upper left quadrant.

This is the latest image from SOHO (Jan 14/07) showing not only the comet but the tail a well. Wow.

I wrote earlier (quite incorrectly) that this comet would be comming back in its orbit about the Sun again in our lifetimes; greater minds and those who are actually plotting this diddy have posited that this is in fact not true and that this may be the only time we (or any earth bound species) will see Comet McNaught. Its eccentricity is greater than 1, meaning that its orbit is not circular and the escape velocity (energy to escape a given gravity) is going to be reached for this star it is passing. Basically, the sun is too small (thus the mass causes to little gravity) to lock this thing up and to keep it comming back, and if Jupiter or Saturn gets a hold of it on its way around it will get a slingshot of alternate gravity that spells 'goodbye' to our famed comet. Even without other planetary gravity causing it trajectory confusion, this comet (as is currently understood) is not going to be a solar system object for long.

So, if you want to see the comet of our time, now is the time.

see ya.