03 November 2007

Session short report:

Skies were the clearest and dead blue on this morning. Neetesh Sharma, my old observing friend joined me after a very long time, inspite a short notice. I had just returned from Hemanth's house borrowing his set of eyepieces and color filters. We both left on my younger brother's bike, all set with a heavy backpack with observing paraphernalia, to traverse the good and bad roads 80 km North from my house! I picked up Neetesh from his home, shortly after which it rained heavily on the way, got covered and started showing patches in course of time.

After reaching Hosahalli at 8:30 pm, we had the fortune of clear skies only for sometime, contrary to what I expected. As soon as we entered the place, within some time the sky cleared and the Cygnus rift was amazing and wide (width of 2 fingers!). Andromeda galaxy was the longest I had seen and I felt I saw a very faint hazy patch where M33 is, and could also see the 6th mag star near it, without dark adaptation. The sky worsened rest of the night with heavy foggy clouds, giving us views of the comet in breaks. Except for the comet, it was yet another disappointing observing session.

However the most amazing view was of Comet Holmes through a 8" f/8 equatorial scope and 10x50 binocs. In the evening when skies were clear for sometime, Neetesh and me pointed the binoculars to the new 'star' which was equivalent to Alpha Perseus in brightness with naked-eyes. And whew...the view through binoculars was something unexplainable; a very large diffuse circular coma with slight brightening in the center. It had got very large, around 1/2 a degree visual (distance between 2 stars near Alpha Per.) But the outer boundary at 1'o' clock position through the binoculars wasn't a complete circle, it showed some wisps around it in that direction. I felt those are the faint ion trails of the comet's developing tail, however this is unconfirmed, but it was observed in a direction opposite to where the Sun had set in the Western direction. I didn't get much time observe this as I had to setup the telescope too.

Later on when we pointed the scope at it, words will not to describe the illusioning view we saw. It does not look like any celestial object, but more of an unidentified object or an excessively circular defocused star! The inner coma joined with the dust tail which was an extension. The outer coma was huge and covered nearly the field of the 32 mm eyepiece. I've yet to sketch the eyepiece view of this, I will try hard representing the view. The bright but colorless outer coma posed problems in sketching.

I came across this image by an amateur from Hyderabad which resembles in every aspect of what I saw in the eyepiece! The inner elongated coma towards 4'o' clock (the dust tail), the circular ring in the outer coma, the central nucleus opposite to the tail. You also see that the outer coma has a 'distinct boundary' from 9 to 12'o' clock, but all around has a fuzzy extended boundary, this was well noticed in the eyepiece.