Breaking News! Comet Lovejoy is now visible in the pre-dawn Eastern sky!

The image above by Colin Legg from Western Australia was captured this morning, 21st December and shows the tail of Comet Lovejoy rising in the East near Antares/Scorpius.

Colin has also posted a timelapse, which you can see on Vimeo.

To try and have a look yourself, look towards the East from 3:30am AEDST until the sky gets too bright. It may only be visible for a few more days - noone knows for sure yet.

In the last news post I mentioned the comet discovery made by Terry Lovejoy. Well it's turned out to be a massive event of its own and has had the attention of science-based media and starting to filter into mainstream media. The encounter between the comet C/2011 W3 (Lovejoy) and the Sun was captured by space-based observatories and we've been able to watch in real-time as the comet headed towards the Sun and come out the other side in-tact, when it was expected to meet an untimely end and burn up.

There's a great wrap up of the imagery and videos here on YouTube.

Keep an eye on this IceInSpace thread for updates, including how and where you might be able to see the comet. Also keep an eye out here on our home page, or on our Facebook page for timely updates.

Total Lunar Eclipse Wrap Up

Wow, well what a night last Saturday night was. Predictions of terrible weather were cast across most of Australia, but for the fortunate ones it cleared right on command and many parts of the country were able to see the spectacular event.

The event received loads of media attention in the few days leading up to the Eclipse, and on the night of the eclipse itself the sheer number of visitors looking for information about the eclipse and reading the article on IceInSpace crushed our server and IceInSpace was struggling under the load. In the end, over 60,000 people read the article - and the vast majority of those were on Saturday itself before the eclipse!

Luckily, Facebook is designed to handle millions more visitors so I was able to share a stream of photos as the eclipse progressed into totality. If you're on Facebook, make sure you LIKE the IceInSpace page, so you can receive live updates if IceInSpace ever does have problems under severe load :)

There's loads more eclipse images posted on the IceInSpace Solar System forum, head on over and check them out.