{"id":325,"date":"2006-10-27T02:09:34","date_gmt":"2006-10-27T02:09:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/blog\/?p=325"},"modified":"2014-08-07T13:08:27","modified_gmt":"2014-08-07T13:08:27","slug":"comet-swan-brightens-signifficantly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/2006\/10\/27\/comet-swan-brightens-signifficantly\/","title":{"rendered":"Comet SWAN Brightens Significantly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Until today I hadn&#8217;t been able to observe the comet SWAN since the <a href=\"\/blog\/?p=317\">12<sup>th<\/sup> of October<\/a> because of the Irish weather. The last time I observed it the comet was rather low in the sky and easily visible in binoculars but definitely not a naked-eye object. Today I managed to observe the comet again twice, once before the sky was fully dark and then again when it was properly dark. The comet has moved significantly and is now a lot higher in the sky in the constellation of Hercules but what really struck me was how much it had brightened.<\/p>\n<p>[tags]Comet, SWAN[\/tags]<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>SWAN is now almost in the same binocular field of view as M13 and is significantly brighter than it. I&#8217;m not great at estimating magnitudes but I&#8217;d estimate the comet&#8217;s brightness at being between one and two magnitudes brighter than M13. To tie down the magnitude a bit better I looked for a star in the same filed of view as the comet that was the same brightness when unfocused to the same size as the comet. I found an almost perfect match, the brightest of a near straight line of stars a little to the east of the comet. When I got home I checked Equinox which showed the star to be SAO 65108 which is magnitude 4.7. Based on the comparison with this star and with M13 I&#8217;d say the comet is about magnitude 4.5. I couldn&#8217;t see it with the naked eye from Maynooth but I&#8217;m putting that down to a combination of poor seeing and light-pollution. I&#8217;d be quite confident that it would be a naked-eye object from a dark observing site on a clear night.<\/p>\n<p>This comet is definitely worth keeping a close eye on over the next few days before the moon spoils the show. You can get a finder chart and the orbital elements for the comet <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aerith.net\/comet\/catalog\/2006M4\/2006M4.html\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Until today I hadn&#8217;t been able to observe the comet SWAN since the 12th of October because of the Irish weather. The last time I observed it the comet was rather low in the sky and easily visible in binoculars but definitely not a naked-eye object. Today I managed to observe the comet again twice, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[36,502,501],"series":[],"class_list":["post-325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-astronomy","tag-astronomy","tag-comet","tag-observation-log"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7t9xK-5f","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7987,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325\/revisions\/7987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}