Comet C/2006 P1 McNaught

On Fri, 19 Jan 2007 23:33:17 -0600, Pat Flannery
wrote:

Everyone said Hale-Bopp was better, but at least up here, Hyakutake was
better.

....Up in the Great White North and it's Yankee cousins, Hayukantspelme
was more visible, while Hale-Bopp looked better below the Yankee Line
of Agression. Both as I pointed out on today's OMBlog, they both were
spectacular, but due to all this waste of a winter storm the skies
were consistently overcast, and any efforts to view C/2006 P1 were for
McNaught.

OM
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OM wrote:
better.


...Up in the Great White North and it's Yankee cousins, Hayukantspelme
was more visible, while Hale-Bopp looked better below the Yankee Line
of Agression.


Saw both, but Hale-Bopp's tail was nowhere near as good as Hayutke's.
The one I of course missed as a kid was Ikeya-Seki.
God, I still remember Kohutek ... "Comet of the Century!"
"Comet of the weak" was more like it.
(How many misspellings did I do in this posting?)

Pat

On Sat, 20 Jan 2007 04:57:54 -0600, Pat Flannery
wrote:

God, I still remember Kohutek ... "Comet of the Century!"

....The problem with Kohoutek was that the Western news media believed
the TASS hype about how much of a display it was going to provide.
Much of the hype was based on Lubos Kohoutek's claim that, based on
the orbital period of 75,000 years, the comet was quite probably an
Oort Cloud object on its first trip around the Sun. At that time,
astronomers believed that comets originating from the Oort cloud -
especially the outer regions - would produce long, bright and thick
tails because they were "virgin" comets and had a lot of loose surface
material to discard to the solar winds. The comet's performance with
regards to expectations was poor enough that most astronomers now
believe Comet Kohoutek was, in fact, a Kuiper Belt Object, and
therefore possessed a more compacted, denser surface that didn't scour
free as easily as it approached perhelion.

....The comet did produce a tail that was visible to the naked eye, but
that was only after perhelion, and was serious attenuated by the
atmosphere. Best views of the comet at its actual peak were achieved
by the Skylab 4 crew, and even they were notably nonplussed by the
event thanks to all the hype. In fact, the only one who really
benefitted - and I use the word sarcastically here - from Kohoutek was
a religious cult whacko named David Berg, who used the comet as a
"sign of the apocalypse(*)" to increase the numbers of his "Children
of God" cult and provide more innocent children for his perverted sex
games.

(*) You just don't know how hard it is for me not to spell that as
"Apokolips". Jack Kirby's influence still holds true, natch!
OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[