A comet's tale

Oneonta weather giveth and Oneonta weather taketh away.

With comet C/2011 L4 (PAN-STARRS) having crossed into the northern hemisphere skies over the last week and a half, I have been excited to not only get to see it myself but potentially have my students observe it during an outdoor lab. I even entertained the thought of a public observing night, having already been scheduled for the 20th, where visitors could view the comet through the telescope. However, nature seems to have had other plans.

Cloudy night after cloudy night passed following the comet's venture into northern skies. With each evening's observations foiled, I grew less and less hopeful that there would ever be an opportunity to see the comet with the unaided eye before it began to fade. But on the evening of March 17, the spirit of St. Patrick must have been strong enough to force the clouds apart over our fair town and my new friend Stash alerted me to clear skies that night. Since the comet was at this point still fairly low in the western sky after sunset, we headed over to the baseball fields above the SUNY Oneonta campus - unfortunately, the observatory at College Camp does not have an ideal view of any horizon.

As we waited for the evening twilight to fade, our eyes scoured the horizon looking for something comet-like. We knew that it should be visible, albeit barely, but after waiting 30-40 minutes we still didn't see it. Stash, wondering if it had set already, got out his phone and pulled up an app that showed its position...and it was evidently still above the horizon. He had brought his 12-inch Dobsonian telescope with him and began to methodically survey the horizon, looking for anything fuzzy. In the meantime, I had my Canon Rebel T3i DSLR camera pointed to the west and was snapping 5-second exposures of the sky, trying to extract any detail out of the fading twilight.

After a few minutes, Stash found it! We were able to see through his telescope the comet's bright coma and tail, reddened slightly due to its low altitude above the horizon. I ran back to the camera and refined its aim, then took an 8-second exposure...and there it was!


I had just received the camera in the mail the previous Friday, so I was (and still am) in the process of learning how to adjust the settings to make a nice image. I took a number of pictures and we spent some time viewing it through the telescope and with our eyes alone. Once we knew where it was, we could see it just above the treeline, though it was admittedly not easy. What a thrill it was to have found the elusive object after what felt like a long wait! We both agreed that this may have been one of the most exciting astronomical objects we've seen, and eventually packed it up for the night when we could no longer feel our fingers.

Unfortunately, the student lab nights and the public viewing night were all clouded out. Next week is spring break, so by the time the students return the comet will be a telescope target instead of a naked-eye object. However, it should still look pretty nice through an eyepiece so maybe we'll get some nice weather. Over the next few weeks, the comet will dim as it moves gradually into the northern sky. In early April it will pass by the Andromeda Galaxy, so that should make for an excellent photo opportunity with the zoom lens. Now I'm hoping for clear skies that night!