For those people who have asked me where to find the comet in the sky, and have tried looking with vague directions like "northeast sky" or "to the left of the moon" and have concluded that the bright planet Venus MUST be the comet(!).
The comet is bright (for a comet) but it is mixed in with the stars of the constellation Perseus, most of which are also about the same brightness.
It looks like a STAR to the unaided eye, but in binoculars, once you look at Perseus, and get over the "ooh ahh" that the milky way star field in that constellation gives you even without a comet present, when you find that one star that is NOT a star even at 7x-10x, then you know for SURE that the thing you are seeing is something unusual. And it looks like the
pictures that I have been posting for days now.
If you go to
this article on the Sky & Telescope website, they have several simplified finder charts that are intended to familiarize the reader with the constellation Perseus. Within that constellation, there is a little triangle (which is normally two stars, but now there is a third "star")... which is tricky to find at first, if you are not already familiar with the constellation, but once you find the little triangle, then each night you go outside you should be able to find it easily.
When you finally see it, you might say "ooh ahh" or "so what?" but even if it doesn't look like something out of a Star Wars movie wooshing by (with sound in space) keep in mind that this thing is a globe/sphere larger than the planet Jupiter, 150 million miles away, further than the planet Mars, and it is still about as bright as the stars in the Big Dipper, which is pretty darn impressive. Imagine if it got as close as comet Hyakutake did in 1996? If this thing were 1 million miles away instead of 150 million, it would look like a second moon in the sky!!!?!?!!
Let me know if you really see it. Happy viewing! And Happy Halloween!!
Chris M in DC
