The Hale Bopp Comet
As I am sure all of you know, we have recently been able to see a new but not permanent additon to the night sky. This addition is known as Hale-Bopp, a comet that is about 122 million miles (about 1.3 times the distance of the sun to the earth) from the earth and is approximately 25 miles wide. Hale-Bopp was discovered on July 23,1995 by two scientists named Alan Hale in New Mexico and
Thomas Bopp in Arizona. This is the first discovery for both of them, although
Alan Hale is one of the top visual comet observers in the world, having seen about 200 comet apparitions. That is one of the reasons they put his name first.
Alan Hale comments, "I love the irony -- I've spent over 400 hours of my life looking for comets, and haven't found anything, and now, suddenly, when I'm not looking for one, I get one dumped in my lap. I had obtained an observation of P/Clark earlier, and needed to wait an hour or so before P/d'Arrest got high enough to look at, and was just passing the time til then, and I decided to look at some deep-sky objects in Sagittarius. When I turned to M70, I saw a fuzzy object in the same field, and almost immediately suspected a comet, since I had been looking at M70 last month, and *knew* there wasn't any other objects there." Thomas Bopp explains his story like this, "On the night of July 22, 1995 some friends and I headed out into the desert for a dark of the moon observing session. The site, which is west of Stanfield, AZ and a few mile south of
Interstate 8 is about 90 miles southwest from my home.
My friend Jim Stevens had brought his 17-1/2" Dobsonian. We started the evening observing some of the Messier objects such as the Veil and North
American Nebulae in Cygnus, when Jim said " Let's look at some of the globulars in Sagittarius." We started our tour with M22 and M28, observing at 50X and then at 180X. Around 11:00 local time, we had M-70 in the field when Jim went to the charts to determine the next object of investigation. I continued watching M-70 slowly drift across the field, when it reached a point 3/4 of the way across a slight glow appeared on the eastern edge. I repositioned the scope to center on the new object but was unable to resolve it. I called to Jim and asked him if he knew what it might be, after a visual inspection he stated he wasn't familiar
"Leda and the Constellation Cygnus." Department of Engineering, University of Michigan. 17 February 1999 http://windows.ivv.nasa.gov/mythology/cygnus.html.
Messier 8, nicknamed the Lagoon Nebula is an interstellar cloud located in Sagittarius, discovered by John Flamsteed in 1680. It is one of the few nebulae that can be seen by the naked eye. It was given its nickname by Agnes
The third thing they debated was how bright novae seemed. Shapley said that some novae looked so bright to us, that they would have be amazingly bright to also be so far away. Curtis said that they were so bright that
It was November 12 when spacecraft Rosetta caught up with the comet called Churyumov-Gerasimenko better know as 67P (Lauren, 2014). The journey took 6.4 billion miles to complete (Lauren, 2014). Also Rosetta sent a lander called Philae to explore the comet and take picture among other things (Lauren, 2014). Interestingly enough when the media reported the comet landing I thing is trumped Kim kardashian attempt at breaking the internet with her nude photos which the media was cover at about the same time as the comet landing. With all that being said you might be asking why should I care? You should care about this comet because comets came from and can tell us about our solar system, also there has not been any unique and important mission as this one, further more it might be the last space mission we get to experience for a while. Now I am going to get in to what comets are and how they got here and talk a little bit
Waller, William H. The Milky Way: An Insider's Guide. Princeton, N.J: Princeton UP, 2013. 42+. Print.
piloted by Sweeney, reached the sky over Kokura on the morning of August 9. He abandoned the
Halley's comet has come back to earth at the strangest times.Halley arrived at the beginning of the battle of hastings in 1066! A man named Mark Twain predicted that sense he was born 2 weeks after the comet he would die with it
2, Alter Dinsmore, Cleminshaw H. Clarence, Philips G John. Pictorial Astronomy. United States: Sidney Feinberg, 1963.
The Orion Nebula contains one of the brightest star clusters in the night sky. With a magnitude of 4, this nebula is easily visible from the Northern Hemisphere during the winter months. It is surprising, therefore, that this region was not documented until 1610 by a French lawyer named Nicholas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc. On March 4, 1769, Charles Messier inducted the Orion Nebula, M42, into his list of stellar objects. Then, in 1771, Messier released his list of objects for its first publication in Memoires de l’Academie.1
Comets and asteroids. They are some of the first celestial bodies that humans observed and truly thought about. From ancient cultures interpreting these near-Earth objects as signs of disaster, to 18th century Europeans studying their paths, to even the extinction of the dinosaurs, comets and asteroids have always been prevalent in the majority of Earth’s history. These objects have intrigued the human race for generations, and continue to do so today. These similar subjects of fascination have many unique and interesting characteristics and a rich history with Earth.
Andrews, Bill. “50 years of Americans in space.” Astronomy. 01 Feb. 2012: 20. eLibrary. Web. 20 Feb. 2014.
was scary looking at the sky. I walked a few yards and I saw in the
totally enveloped in fog. I was facing a rock wall. The blue dots on the