Comet McNaught Streaks Towards Sun
It’s our esteemed scientific opinion that global interest in astronomy would skyrocket (pun somewhat intended) if all comets and space objects had names as cool as Comet McNaught.
The comet was only recently discovered — on August 7th of last year:
When Australian astronomer Robert McNaught announced Aug. 7 that he had discovered a faint comet on a photograph taken at the Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, it was a distant and inconspicuous object. But its orbital motion at once made it clear that this comet, officially catalogued as C/2006 P1, might grow very bright right about now.
Comet McNaught’s orbit indicates that it will sweep to within just 15.8 million miles (25.4 million kilometers) of the Sun on Jan. 12. This rather close approach—less than half the average distance of Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun—suggests the comet has the potential to briefly evolve into a bright object. The big question is, just how bright?
Recent estimates have ranged widely from magnitude +2.1 (about as bright as Polaris, the North Star) to a dazzling -8.8 (about 40 times brighter than Venus)!
Just how brilliant McNaught gets remains to be seen over the next 4 days…. but it’s already dazzling the naked eye around the world:
A series of images of Comet McNaught can be found here; or click here for a video of McNaught’s orbit.
We encourage you to bring binoculars and a camera when viewing the comet, but never fear if you miss that great shot:
Regardless of just how bright Comet McNaught becomes, beginning on Friday, Jan. 12 and continuing through Monday, Jan. 15, it will be passing through the field of view of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory ("SOHO"); a spacecraft that was launched in 1995 to study the Sun.
Astronomers hope to get spectacular views of the comet by utilizing SOHO’s LASCO C3 camera, whose images can also be viewed in real time here.
We’ll have more on McNaught when it’s closest to the sun on the 12th of this month.
