1 October 2013

My calendar says that Comet ISON, which is supposed to become daylight naked-eye bright, is supposed to be visible from the Northern Hemisphere now so I looked it up in my planetarium and found that the old crescent Moon is right next to Regulus and Mars is right next to the Moon and ISON, in turn, is right next to Mars so I decided to give it a try this morning.

Mobile Observatory graphic

I was not able to find anything in the area but the one star to the north of Mars that was shown in my map. I don't know how bright the comet is supposed to be right now but evidently it is below the limiting magnitude of my hand-held Nikon She binocular.

The Moon looked very nice with a bit of Earthshine. The dark side looked round and the bright side looked like a bathing cap added to the round portion that gave the Moon the appearance of being elliptical.

There was something bright up to the right of the moon that looked out of place and I was having trouble figuring out the star pattern because of it. I .couldn't find the Big dipper so figured I wasn't seeing Arcturus. Orion looked nice to the right but it has been so long since I have seen the ,pwinter sky that I didn't recognize a wanderer in Pollux's crotch. After I knew what I was looking at I could just separate Jupiter and much fainter Wasat. As twilight progressed the separation increased until Wasat became washed out by the growing twilight.

Mobile Observatory graphics

There was a morning ISS pass so I observed that as it came from behind the buildings in Manhattan E and progressed across the sky to go into Earth's penumbra in the hind end of Canis Major in the SE.

ISS Detector graphic