Comet Neowise over the Costa Blanca
You may have heard recently that we have a visitor from the farthest reaches of our solar system at the moment. It was only discovered on 27th March of this year by the NEOWISE mission which is space telescope which can do wide field surveys of the sky and keeps a look out for Near Earth Objects.
The object that they discovered is comet called C2020 F3 Neowise (discovered in the 3rd month of 2020 by the Neowise telescope). It was headed towards the sun and it could, like so many of the previous comets, have broken up during it’s encounter and we would not have had the opportunity to see it. However, this comet survived it’s trip around the sun and become a new object for us to look at, first in the early morning sky and later in our night sky.
Comets come from the very edge of our solar system and are interesting objects of study to the scientific community as they are thought to contain pristine material from the formation of the solar system, held together with ice and dust. Sometimes they return at regular intervals, like Haleys comet, but sometimes they pay us one visit only on their way out of the solar system. This particular one will return in 6800 years time.
A characteristic of a comet is that as they heat up when they come closer to the sun, their ice melts and a trail of dust and gas streams from the comet. The tail is pushed in the direction away from the sun by the solar wind. During the past couple of months, we could indeed see the tail of Neowise and in some very detailed images, it is possible to see the gas tail, separate to the debris tail.
The Costa Blanca Astronomical Society has a number of members, who enjoy imaging Astronomical objects and we thought that you might like to see a couple of images taken by our members of the comet as it flew in the skies above by Denia. One is taken by a standard DSLR camera without any telescopic aids and shows the comet over the Montgo. The other is taken through a telescope and shows the tail in more detail. There are many images on the internet of this comet, but it is always interesting to see what can be achieved by amateurs.
If you would like to see more of the images taken by our members, you can see them at https://costablanca astronomers.wordpress.com/ gallery-2/astro-gallery/comet -neowsie-july-2020/
Next week on the evening August 12 , it is the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. Whilst you are looking at these meteors, you might like to consider that what you are seeing is the debris of an earlier comet passing through earth’s atmosphere and burning up giving us our annual summer show. The earlier comet is called Swift Tuttle. The shower is called the Perseids, because the meteors appear to emanate from the constellation Perseus.
Happy viewing.