Comet Watch

For those who have some interest in astronomy would have been fascinated with the view of comet Mc Naught tonight. The comet made its appearance in the Southern Hemisphere and tonight in particular was spectacular. It had a very long tail and was almost as bright as Venus. Both appeared to have roughly the same altitude in the sky and not far from each other and both dipped towards the horizon after the sun moved below the horizon.

I was very disappointed when after much hype; Halley’s Comet’s appearance in 1986 was nothing but a fuzzy star. This comet is different; its path around the Sun is inside that of planet Mercury. No one was sure what will happen to the comet when it passes so close by the sun. It was also uncertain whether a close passage like this would have any effects on the Sun with Solar flare activity.

The Sun is currently at Solar Minimum so activity is generally low but we have seen recently extraordinary flares on the Sun’s surface with X9 flares about a month ago. Are these things connected in some way? What’s also interesting is that this new comet was only recently discovered; August 2006 by Mr. R.H Mc Naught.

It tells us that the Oort Cloud can potentially hide some devastating comets and rocks and no one can for sure predict that the next “killer” asteroid is only a few millions of years away, like scientists tend to report. Comet Mc Naught shows us that these space travelers can be huge and give us spectacular evening shows, but they can potentially also be devastating to our planet.