Autumn is here, and it's a wonderful time for stargazing. Find out what's up from Spaceweather PHONE.
COMET C/2006 T1 (LEVY): Proving that fancy CCD cameras are not required to discover comets, David H. Levy of Tucson, AZ, reports his visual discovery with a 0.41-m reflector of a diffuse comet close to Saturn in the sky: ephemeris. The new comet glows like a 10th magnitude star, making it an easy target for medium-to-large backyard telescopes. Ref: IAU Circular 8757.
BONUS: This morning, Gil Esquerdo used a 48-inch telescope on Mt. Hopkins, Arizona, to take this picture of Comet Levy.
FULL DAWN MOON: When looking at the Moon, the best place to train your telescope is the day-night terminator, where the long shadows of lunar dawn create beautiful contrasts of light and dark. Consider the following: What would the Moon look like if it were dawn everywhere, all at once? Here is the answer:
This unusual image was created by French photographer Ivan Goncalves. He made it by stitching together strips of dawn from photos he took of ten different lunar phases. Call it the "full Dawn Moon."
The full Dawn Moon is the same Moon we see every month--same mountains, same craters, same lava seas. Yet it looks strangely different. Two nights from now the full Harvest Moon will appear. Save this photo and compare the two.
SUNDOG-PADDLE: Can a sundog swim? On Sept. 29th, photographer Samo Smrke spotted one among the goldfish in a pond in Murska Sobota, Slovenia:
Swimming? No. The sundog was a reflection of the sky above--more than 5 km above. That's where ice crystals float in high clouds, catching the rays of the sun and transforming them into rainbow-colored 'dogs.
When you see a sundog in a pond, look up and around for more icy halos. Above him, Smrke also saw "a bright circumzenithal arc and an impressive parhelic circle--a great display!"