|
2 things get equal first for me.
Seeing comet Hyakutake from the dark pre dawn skies of Gloucester, NSW. I was visiting an Aunt at the caravan park there for the weekend. It was cloudy all day Saturday and into the night, so I went to bed disappointed (yes I was specifically there to try and see and photograph the comet) My 10 inch scope and film camera gear and lenses was packed in my then Subaru wagon. About 3 am mum woke me, she had happened to look outside and saw stars. So I, fully dark adapted from sleep walked outside without turning on any light. The southern sky was brilliant, I kept walking till I was well clear of the caravan and turn around not knowing what to expect. I was stunned. This gigantic comet stretched across the northern sky, its brilliant white coma in the east, and its tail full of resolvable streamers stretching far to the west. I only enjoyed it for a minute before sprinting to the car, and driving to the far end of the park and setting up in record time, everything went so well, locating Octans and polar aligning in minutes. I piggybacked my Canon T70 camera with Kodak ISO 200 film onto the 10 inch, with a 300MM F5.6 canon lens. I looked through the scope at the coma and was stunned to see a brilliant needle of light pointing in opposite direction of the sun from the fantastically brilliant central condensation. Guiding on this was easy, having to turn up the reticle brightness to see it above the glare! It was moving north so quick that guiding on the comet was the only way to get clear comet images, though no chance of fitting in the tail. I also swapped the 300mm lens for the 50mm one to try and fit it all in. The images made it into the next edition of Sky & space, the 300mm one making it onto the front cover too. Fog was threatening to form, when swapping lenses I had the one not being used inside my coat keeping it warm so it wouldn’t fog when I used it. It worked.
The other event is the impact plume of Comet SL9 fragment G when it hit Jupiter. I had seen the HST shots of the smaller chunks on the TV news, a plume was actually visible from the impact site just behind the limb of Jupiter, so I worked out that the big fragment, G should make one big enough to see in my 10 inch. So I, and about a dozen mates set up in my backyard, never had there been so many telescopes at my place. The drive was running, optics collimated and eyepiece focussed as we waited. After a while I saw what i thought to be a moon emerging from behind the planet, but as it emerged it wasn’t round, but rather mushroom shaped. I yelled out that I could see the explosion plume! Others came over for looks and confirmed it It soon cleared the planet totally and sat there for a few mins as a giant mushroom cloud, the size of a jovian moon, before flattening out and succumbing to Jupiter’s heavy gravity and falling back. An hour later a chunk of the atmosphere seemed to be missing as the impact site rotated into view, we were absolutely stunned. We had witnessed an event so rare it made solar eclipses commonplace. Though many amateurs saw directly the impact sites precious few saw an actual explosion plume. I now know that if a comet impact can throw a fireball hundreds of miles high against Jupiter’s gigantic gravity well, if it hit Earth, we would be finished, end of story.
Well, that’s my greatest experience, though just slightly less is recovering Halleys comet the same day as anyone else as it came from behind the sun. It has a sellar like core, a wispy halo round it, so bright I would have been able to see it in daylight had I not had to go to work. Id looked up an ephemeris of it and started looking when it was still not far from the sun, well before magazines suggested looking for it. I cant remember the actual date but I think it was mid in February, not long after perihelion. As it receded from the sun it lost this stunningly bright central condensation, and sadly many missed out on this early and brief phenomenon.
Scott
|
