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By Emily Lakdawalla

Watching comet C/2006 P1 (McNaught)

Jan. 12, 2007 | 09:29 PST | 17:29 UTC

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I've been remiss in not mentioning this earlier in the week: a recently discovered comet, C/2006 P1 (McNaught), has been gracing the twilight skies in the northern hemisphere. It's actually now disappearing from northern hemisphere skies -- it will be too close to the Sun, lost in the Sun's glare, for a few days -- but should then become visible to southern hemisphere viewers. Go here and here at Bad Astronomy for some information on viewing it. Here's one lovely photo of the comet, taken by Austrian amateur observer Robert Schultz -- which I selected in part because most people who are attempting to observe it seem to be battling to see it through near-horizon clouds:

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Comet McNaught
A view of Comet McNaught on January 11, 2007, in the evening skies in Austria. Credit: Robert Schultz

And here's a link to a nifty little video of McNaught descending below the horizon, from British amateur astronomer Martin Andrews.

It's my own weird personal bias that I tend not to sit up and take notice of astronomical events, even naked-eye ones, until I can see them through the eyes of a spacecraft, possibly because I've lived my whole life in places with horrendous light pollution. So the reason I'm posting today is because the comet is now at perihelion, and is passing through the field of view of the Sun-observing SOHO spacecraft. This diagram shows the expected course:

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Comet McNaught's course through SOHO's field of view
The image shows the expected track of comet McNaught through SOHO's coronagraph LASCO C3. SOHO is permanently aimed toward the Sun; the coronagraph blocks the brightest light from the Sun, allowing SOHO to view the Sun's corona as well as comets and planets that wander within the field of view. Comet McNaught will appear in the field of view at around 10:00 UT on January 12, 2007 (a few hours before perihelion) in the upper-left of the images and travel almost vertically down, exiting C3's field of view in the lower left at roughly 03:00 UT on January 16th. Credit: ESA, NASA SOHO / LASCO team

The comet is now visible in SOHO's LASCO C3 coronagraph, and you can get realtime images and movies of the comet's passage here. The comet has just peeked into view over the last couple of hours; I'll post an animation here in a day or two.

While checking out the SOHO site, I came across this view, captured by one of the recently launched STEREO spacecraft (there are two STEREO spacecraft, "A" and "B", which are drifting ahead and behind Earth in solar orbit). All I can say is wow! Check out the Naval Research Laboratory sungrazer weblog for more images.

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Comet McNaught from STEREO
This image from the SECCHI/HI-1B instrument on the STEREO-B spacecraft was taken on January 11, 2007, just after the door covering the instrument was opened for the first time after the STEREO launch on October 26, 2006. The image is dominated by a spectacular view of comet McNaught. The comet tail is approximately 7 degrees in length and shows multiple rays. The brightness of the coma is saturating the image even at the shortest exposure time of 1 second; the vertical line through the image results from this saturation. Credit: NRL / U. Birmingham / Rutherford Appleton Laboratory / Centre Spatiale de Liege

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