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Pojmanski Comet in View 31

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the eye-candy dept.
Wolfwood writes "For the Astronomers - the Pojmanksi Comet is a very recently discovered comet, magnitude 5.3, and is currently viewable in the morning sky around 5 am in the North America."
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Pojmanski Comet in View More

Pojmanski Comet in View

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  • When I tried to view the comet, I get this message flashing in the sky: "Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
  • currently viewable in the morning sky around 5 am in the North America

    I'd rather enjoy my sleep thank you.

    But I'm certain there are other people who care, so I'll let them enjoy the comet.
    • At mag 5.3, I'll join you in the whole "sleeping in" concept. The faintest stars observable with the naked eye are around mag 6. In a city, you generally can't see anything worse than mag 3.

    • The city is at its darkest and quietest just before dawn, and the astronomy is as good as its going to get. Sometimes I actually set my alarm and pad out to the back yard to see what's up.

      I still think it's neat that the stars at dawn are the evening stars of the next season. Perhaps I need to get out more. A couple of years ago at a star party I remember watching Orion rise at dawn in August. Magic!

      ...laura

  • I for one welcome our new long tailed overlords.

    Break out the Nikes and chop off those testicles. I'm outa here!
  • From the aricle "looking like a small, circular patch of light with a bluish-white hue and an almost star-like center".

    No tail :( !! Probably pointing away form us. I personally prefer comets with long tails, they look nice :) This will just look like some nebula. Anyway, thats not gonna dissuade me from trying to spot it (aagh will have to wake up before sunrise).
    • The solution is simple; stay up until sunrise!
      Yeah, I'll be looking for it too. Next lifetime, I'll get a hobby that keeps me indoors when it's cold and too early in the morning.
              -aiabx
      • The solution is simple; stay up until sunrise!

        Thats exactly what I'll do this Friday :) (I actually do that whenver I have an obscenely early flight)

    • Actually, since it's past perihelion and heading towards Earth, the tail is likely pointing roughly towards us.

  • I tried checking out the comet, but the server seems to have crashed. There's a big 'bandwidth exceeded for this month' message in the sky. Way to go /., you've ruined nature.
  • Glad to see they named a comet after a child molester. Oh... Pojmanski? My bad.
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grzegorz_Pojma%C5%84 s ki [wikipedia.org]

    Dr Grzegorz Pojmaski (born April 16, 1959, in Warsaw, Poland), Polish astronomer, worker of Warsaw University Astronomical Observatory, Poland.

    Maybe I was the only one who wondered what kind of a name Pojmaski was.

    Apparently he's discovered two new comets. I don't know enough about astronomy to know if that is a "big deal" or not.

    The Warsaw University website has a page with a cool java-based model. http://www.astrouw.edu.pl/~gp/asas/asas_c2006.html [astrouw.edu.pl]

    • Having discovered more than one comet is a reasonably big thing, yeah. Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel [wikipedia.org] and David Levy [wikipedia.org] each discovered or co-discovered 21, but that's an uncommonly large number. I suspect Fabrizio Bernardi, a postdoc where I work, is happy to have recently discovered Comet P/2005 V1 Bernardi [hawaii.edu], since he wasn't even looking for comets at the time.
    • Maybe I was the only one who wondered what kind of a name Pojmaski was.

      No but then again Im Polish and I could tell that the name was Polish because of the -ski at the end of the name. Supposedly it was a sign of nobility and then everyone got the idea to add that to their last names.
  • Stars' brightness are rated starting at -1 for the brightest. The larger the number the dimmer the star.

    More info [stargazing.net].
    • General speaking, objects of 6 magnitude and brighter (lower) are considered visible to the naked eye. This object would presumably be MUCH more visible with a good pair of binoculars which gets you down into the 9 magnitude range.

      If your going to be viewing with the naked eye, let your eyes get accustomed to the darkness for a bit first and eat some carrots the night before. ;) More importantly, if you live downtown, good luck, you might not be able to see through the light (or other) polution.

    • Yeah. (Well, um, the Sun is magnitude -26.7 for us... but anyway!)

      The brighest non-sun star we can see, Sirius, is a +1.4 magnitude; in the city anything beyond about +4 to +5 isn't going to be visible, but with properly dark skies you can get to +6 or +7 naked-eye. So this comet should be visible to the naked eye under dark skies.

      Oh, and obviously, these are all apparent magnitude - how bright things appear to be. There's also absolute magnitude, or luminosity, which is basically how bright things actua
  • I realize this is completely off-topic, but what happened to all the mods? I browse comments at a threshold of +3, and there's a single digit number of posts that meet that criteria for all but a handful of topics over the past few days. Did /. stop handing out mod points?
  • Sounds a bit picky, but a more proper way to refer to it is "Comet Pojmanski", rather than "the Pojmanski Comet". Nevertheless, it's very good to see my old friend Grzegorz having visible success with his automated all-sky monitoring cameras (ASAS) down in Chile.

    Amateurs work hard to learn the sky in sufficient detail so as to be able to recognise new interlopers such as comets as they search each night, whereas Grzegorz's system is fully automated both in terms of taking the CCD images and in searching thr
  • The fact that we discover something just now thats apperently so close to earth,(comets are small compaired to planets, stars, ect and the fact we can acually see it, to me at least, says it is fairly close compaired to other objects in the solar system.) just tells me we should put more money out there for observation-like technology. If we missed a comet, what else have we missed *shrugs*, there could be more interesting things out there.
    • The reason we've previously "missed" this comet is that it's normally extraordinarily faint, when far from the Sun where it spends most (if not almost all: I don't know if this is a periodic comet) of its life. Most comets originate either in the Kuiper Belt out beyond Neptune, or in the Oort Cloud, way, way out beyond Neptune: these are generally the most distant objects in the Solar System, but occasionally fall inwards.

      Thus, new comets are generally only discovered when they fall in close to the Sun: the
    • I wonder how big the core object is. It wasn't seen until it passed Earth orbit, and started to cook out gas.

      That feels like noticing that stones are being thrown at you when they hit the water. I would sure feel better if we invested a bit more in watching and preparations to do something if targeted.

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