Comet Hartley 2 Update…
I’ve had many emails asking about Comet Hartley 2, which passes the Double Cluster in Perseus tonight and tomorrow, making it a little easier to find. While the comet’s brightness is 6th magnitude, its light is spread over a wide area which makes it surprisingly hard to see. Here are a few tips to help you spot it…
• The comet is just north of the Double Cluster tonight, and just south of it tomorrow. This map in the first article about the comet will help you find it.
• This is not an easy comet to spot from anything other than VERY dark sky. I barely saw it tonight from very clear urban sky with 12×36 image-stabilized binoculars.
• And to see the comet at all, I had to all the tricks (as laid out in our free Introduction to Stargazing course at Stargazer U): I made sure my eyes were dark-adapted, I used averted vision to expose the most sensitive part of my eye, and I jiggled the binoculars back and forth to make the faint image move (our eyes have evolved to see faint moving objects better than stationary objects), and I used high magnification binoculars to darken the background sky. Most of all, I kept looking… you have to be patient with this comet.
• Darker sky and bigger binoculars will help a great deal… 10×50′s would do nicely. You will NOT see a tail with binoculars. Even in photographs, there scant evidence of a tail on this little comet. Here’s an image of the comet as it passed the “Pac-Man” nebula in Cassiopeia…
• A telescope at low magnification should make the comet pop out nicely.
• The next week or so is the best time to see Comet Hartley 2. Over this time, it will not be visible from southern locales like southern Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa. But the comet will rise over the northern horizon as seen from the southern hemisphere later this month as it enters the constellation Auriga.
If you can’t spot the comet, don’t worry. There are many fine things to see in this part of the sky, including the Double Cluster and many other open star clusters in Cassiopeia.
Above all, try to leave your cares behind this weekend and enjoy a few minutes under the night sky. It’s good for you!
