Re: 3d comet

[wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Bob Wier)]

>Anyone have any suggestions on how to shoot comet Hyakutake this week?.  
>Sunday night is the closest approach (9.3 million mile).  I'd like to try 
>to get a few stereo pairs and wonder if anyone else will be trying.  Any 
>help on f-stop/exposure length and lense seperation would be greatly 
>appreciated.  I'll probably use either my Realist 3.5 or my Minolta SLR.

Hi Todd (and others). I went out observing last night (Wed-Thurs) and
the comet was quite visible from here, high up in the sky once I got
away from the city lights. The tail was not well defined but was probably
at least the width of two full moons, extending towards the east. Great
view with 8*30 binocs. 

About 2 nights ago, I was observing, and seemed to be seeing large changes
in brightness of the head in a short period of time (maybe 20 seconds). I
note from the web that this has been confirmed via spectral analysis, but
I'm not sure if my visual observaton was because of that or if it was
atmospherics or just my tired old eyeballs. 

At the point of closet approach, some web pages are saying that thru
a telescope you may actually be able to see it moving in real time against
the stellar background - a pretty unique experience. 

I located several pictures on the web which were taken close enough 
together in time that you had the comet visible against the same stars,
but unfortunately none had a great deal of overlap - apparently it's moving
so fast that photos taken on two successive nights are so far apart that
you don't see the same stars at a reasonable magnification! Depending
on your lens arrangement and film speeds, exposures could be as short
as 5 minutes or so. 

I'm going to continue searching the web for pictures to combine into
a stereo pair. One good web site seems to be:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/comet/hyakutake/

As of 2 PM Central (USA) time, it was saying....

COUNTDOWN: 4 Days to Earth Closest Approach 
Current Distance From Earth: 0.175 AU ( 16.3 Million Miles) 

Incidentally, apparently the period of this comet has been 
determined to be about 15,000 years, so better catch it on
this go-around if you are interested, unlike one of my colleagues
who said he would go out to look at Halley's on the next pass :-)

THANKS!

   -------- Bob Wier ----- wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -----
  East Texas State University Computer Science Dept.
   keeper of the Motorola MC68HC11, ICOM Radio, and
   Overland-Trails mailing lists and the LDS Genealogy
                     State Research Outlines 
         "Congress - n. - the antonym of Progress"



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