Transcript:
I got to get ready to go so you need to be out by you you need to be off at
least 10 till 7 okay something like that because it only takes 10 minutes to
drive to the Planetarium which is where the event is happening and it it's clear enough tonight I think we have mostly
clear sky so we'll be pointing the moon out and of course Jupiter my favorite time I I was going
to ask David where he had where David were you were planning on seeing the next total eclipse the April 8th where
will you be I'll be with Scotty in southern Texas near the Mexican border
with astronomy magazine uh well I guess but uh I've
been scheduled for this for a long time and I'm I think they have their own thing going
on no it's our our event's called The Crossroads of the eclipses Star Party
okay and it is just North of Leakey Texas so it's uh very close to the
Mexican border but that's kind of where everybody's going Hill Country close to the Mexican border everybody's trying to
get as much um totality times they can get you know
so yeah that does look like the best place I've from everything I've read too
and then I know sky and Telescope had a great article online about I think it was by Jay Anderson about this being
because of an El Nino year he compared all the El Nino years in April and ter
out it's actually clearer in Texas you know it's even better than what the general forecast is oh really that's
good yeah that's good to know yeah Scott are you gonna be in Texas I am going to
be in Texas yep that's good I'll be down there with David
leing oh that's right he just said that didn't he it is I do
anyway there's G to be a lot of people in Texas yes we all ought to get together and have a party oh truly we're
g we're gonna have a party you can count on that good I always like to put the
party in Star party so yes that's the right
attitude how far is where you will be Scott from an San
Antonio uh about 2 hours East oh excuse
me two hours West of San Antonio I'm two hours East I'm going to miss the eclipse
uh two hours West of San Antonio we are very very close to the U uh Center Line
um I can give you some details of that we're going to be on a cattle ranch
so that's a true Texas style and this cattle ranch out where this area is has
like uh a long time ago they brought in for I guess big game hunters or whatever
they brought in all kinds of African animals well those African animals had
babies and more African animals so they're out running all over the place out there wow yeah and so would be
pretty cool exotic animals out on this thing and during the annular eclipse the
events called the crossroads because the annular eclipse happened right over the
exact same spot and um so um you know it was uh but they had a
they had a sighting of these exotic animals you know walking past them you know animals you can normally only
either see in Africa or in a zoo you know yeah so that could be some nice
Imaging I was gonna say I want to see some pictures of that if they got pictures of it or not
it probably took him by surprise The Sounds you might hear during tot you know you know the you
know animal affected anyway but you're going to have like lots of extra species you know and wow that's a lot of
possible data there if you're I guess but that'll be cool we're gonna have
four minutes and 21 seconds of totality that's what it's expected and
um uh there's wineries Vineyards tasting
rooms stuff like that out there and um
uh Mickey's kitchen that had their their last winter star party which I
attended just what last week um uh was
uh that that was their last winter star party and the last astronomy event that Mickey's ketchin will
do uh will be the crossroads of the eclipse star party so oh Mickey's isn't
going to be at the winter star party anymore ever again ever oh no I hate to hear that are retiring brownies World
song is is to see a total eclipse because they've never seen it before oh yeah oh that's yeah that's a nice
way yeah definitely gonna be down in Texas too is that
right I'm sorry you talking oh yeah Terry you're in Texas well yes I will be
in Texas too I'll be around Fredericksburg uhhuh very good but we are going to be
let's see the
uh side let's see how close are we going to be oh we're going to be 10.4 miles
Northeast of the exact center line so we're going to be very very close and I guess that that uh the umbrell path is
120 and a half miles across so
I hope everybody sees this because nobody that has never seen this will be so blown away I mean everyone that has
seen it is always blown away too but and all the guys that are gonna miss it are gonna be not blown away for sure yeah I
mean it's something you just never forget that's true I'm just amazed that
it's happening again we're all still alive we were probably all at the 2017 eclipse and I remember thinking 24
seemed like a long time and yeah here we are yeah unbelievable it's like here we are I feel very
grateful well definitely it is now uh 7 PM eastern time is time to get
started we go I got a nice little feature here about a water escaping from
a comet and then we go straight to you Terry okay thanks
Scott [Music]
[Applause] [Music]
hello everybody this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and it's my pleasure to
introduce Terry man uh from the astronomical League she is hosting her
35th astronomical League live program uh Terry great to see you there you are in
front of the it looks like the very large array so I wouldn't mind being there right
now yeah thank thank you thank you Scott it's great to be
here and welcome everybody thank you for joining us tonight uh tonight as you
know probably our speaker will be Bob King and he has an amazing talk coming
up but for right now let's start with Dave uh D Levy and let's let him get us
started with a poem well thank you so much thank you very very much Terry it's
good to be here I can't wait to hear Bob's lecture today I've known Bob for
number of years and uh I'm really I'm really excited about this my quotation
today comes from one of the first things that William Shakespeare ever wrote as a
playright hung it's the opening lines to Henry the6 part one hung be the
heavens with black yield day to night comments importing changes in time times
and States brandish your Crystal Tresses in the sky Terry back to
you that was short David I wasn't quite ready for
you record how short yeah but very excellent uh excellent quote it was it
was very nice thank you so much and I appreciate you being here David it it is
amazing to have you on all of our shows thank you very much thanks Terry it's a pleasure to be here all right what we're
going to do now is I am going to introduce Bob King now Bob King fell in
love with the night sky in astronomy when he was a kid growing up in Illinois and he loves to share his passion with
people of all ages and we're grateful you do he writes for sky and telescopes
website and magazine and maintains astrobot astronomy blog he his books
night sky with the naked eye and wonders of the night sky you must see before you
die describe the joys of skywatching while urban legends of Space examin
Science and pseudoscience in astronomy Bob wants to see everything he's read
about in astronomy books with the exception of falling into a black hole I
think I can relate to that too Bob thank you so much for being here tonight and I
am looking very much forward to this talk and I know a lot of other people are too well that is great uh thank you
very much Terry and I want to thank the astronomical league for having me David I loved your poem anytime I hear the
word crystalline talking about comets it just Rings true in my ear so lovely
lovely poem thank you for that yeah we're going to talk about a
comet I bet a bunch of you have observed this Comet already if not I'm going to urge you to go out and track it because
it's a really interesting object to see and we'll start up here with
uh sharing my screen of course
and hopefully someone will tell me yes Bob we see it you're sharing it yes you
see a big comment there yeah and you're presentation mode looks good then we're
good thank you very much so uh this the comment we're going to talk talk about is called Comet Pon Brooks it's a
periodic Comet that's why it's got a p in its name 12p uh Comet Pon Brooks and I kind of
nicknamed it for me anyway the popcorn Comet because uh unlike some comets this
one is just full of surprises it's literally always popping like popcorn you know you turn around you hear
another pop another pop and by popping I mean that the comet under goes these bright outbursts now typically comets as
they approach the sun will brighten and then as they recede they will fade but on top of that with Comet ponds Brooks
it's exploding it's erupting in addition to that so we're getting these extra
bright uh infusions of dust and fresh ice which are called uh eruptions or
outbursts so we're going to talk about this Comet and about the comet's Outburst before we launch right into
that for the sake of those who are not so familiar with comets I want to just give kind of a basic uh view of what a
comet is got a bunch of pictures courtesy of various space graph that have taken images of these objects and
they're kind of like asteroids in a sense they're very small bodies because they're so small they don't have
sufficient gravity to form themselves into spheres so they have rather irregular shapes some look like rubber
ducks others bowling pins potatoes pick your one whatever you like
uh there's examples on the right and when I'm always trying to find an example of well what's a comet like here
on Earth what's Comet like in our environment and since comets consist
primarily of iced uh various kinds of IES but mostly of water ice that's uh
enriched with dust you know ancient solar system dust they kind of remind me
of these things down here which are those little I call them snow turds that
form in your wheel wells during the winter months and Terry maybe you're going to have some of those tomorrow
morning after the snow if you drive around but it's like this kind of porous uh Frable pieces of vices that chip off
you know when you give them a kick and it comments a little bit like that in that it's made primarily of ice and dirt
we call it dirt but it's really solar system dust mixed in you can make your
own Comet which maybe some of you have tried I did this for a group once and it it actually worked where you take
crushed dry ice and water and basically the ingredients of comets which includes
um carbonous carbon Rich materials sand representing silicates and you crush it
all together in a ball push it smush it and then pull it out of the bag and there it is you can see it kind of
steaming in front of you those little jets of gas which is the carbon dioxide
in the comet showing up as it vaporizes try sometimes it's really fun
to build your own Comet and if you don't want to build it you could just look in your wheel well because there's something rather like a comet there a
comets distant from the sun when they're very remote they basically are inert
bodies of dirty ice and if you were to fly by one in a spaceship and look at it
you'd go that kind of looks like an asteroid but in their orbits around the
Sun as they approach the Sun the heat from the Sun vaporizes those IES and
because it's a small body and it's in outer space there's no atmosphere the
ice in comets goes directly from Ice to Vapor so and it's called sublimation so
it doesn't turn to liquid it goes solid to gas and you can see here far from the
Sun the comet is like I said more asteroidal in appearance but as it gets closer to the Sun that ice vaporizes it
carries off the dust from the exterior and interior of the Comet into space and
sunlight pushes the dust literally pushes the Dust Away the comet to form
the tail and it has two tails if you look closely at the comet no first we have to see just how beautiful they are
too because even though they're the comet itself the nucleus as it's called
the comet body is so very very tiny once it's heated by the Sun and Ice vaporizes
you get a a coma this glow this kind of glowing temporary atmosphere and that
can be hundreds of thousands of miles across and Tails can grow to be millions of miles long until you start with
virtually nothing like a pee and before long as it approaches the sun you get some magnificent comets like this one
here the great Comet of 1861 which looks a little bit like Comet West did back in
1976 these great comets come every occasionally uh looking at what a comet is made out
of the coma is the glowing ball around the nucleus and that has ice particles
it has dust in it and it has gases from vaporizing IES and that includes water
vaporizing carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide ises plus ammonia whole bunch of
different things we'll look at in a bit more detail you can't actually see the nucleus inside a comet's head because it
is completely uh camouflaged by all the dust that it's
producing as it's approaching the Sun so you just see this really bright spot which we call the pseudo nucleus and a
comet often will have two tails especially as it gets closer to the Sun the dust is pushed off and Away behind
the comet's head by radiation pressure from the Sun again that is literally the
pressure of sunlight that creates the dust tail whereas the solar wind blows
back the gases from the comet which is mostly Believe It or Not carbon monoxide
yikes you don't want to get stuck in that tail do you and then it's illuminated or fluorescent in sunlight
the ultraviolet light from sunlight will actually excite the molecules of that gas and cause it to Glo blue so many
comets have these two tails a dust tail that goes off in One Direction kind of follows the curvature of the comet's
orbit and then you've got that very narrow U ion tail it's called because
it's ionized gases that are coming off the comet so it's really neat how it splits into two and you can see both of
these types of Tails sometimes with a naked eye if it's a bright Comet but definitely through a telescope this was
the famous green Comet and Comet observers will chuckle at that because they know that virtually every Comet
turns green as it approaches the sun because of the gases in there it's a carbon Rich gas that fluoresces so but
that word got picked up by the media and people went wild which was good in a way
because uh there was a lot of aish shelling comets and everybody back then last year wanted to see the green Comet
through my telescope so now let you know a little bit about comets how big they are kind of what they're made out of why this
little tiny thing can form two different tales and so forth we're going to look at our special featured comment tonight
and that is 12 P Pond Brooks not sure what you use to locate comets when you
go out um I am kind of a comet crazy guy I would say it's the thing I am most
interested in in the sky I love following them all the time um and I I
think I've seen a fair number of David ley's comets over time so but I I've
maintained an interest for many years so this is Comet Pon Brooks the 12th is the 12th Comet to have its orbit nailed down
determined and the peas dancer periodic because it returns to our neighborhood
from Beyond the planet Neptune at far end of its orbit it returns to our neighborhood every 71 years right now
and hey it's making its return this is the first time that most of us are going to see this com the last time it was
here was when I was born 1953 so darn I was born just a little bit too soon to
catch two apparitions of comet 12p Pon Brooks this is the view from uh an app
that I enjoy using called Sky Safari and it will show you the comet and also the orientation of the tail another simple
software this is free used on a laptop whatever uh this is stellarium and this
is the comet and its position is shown for tomorrow evening you can see where
it's located that comet 12p is low in the sky at the end of dust notice that
it's right above the square Pegasus off to the upper left of signis so if you want to watch this Comet and I and I do
encourage you to get out because it's actually bright enough now to see in binoculars you'll want to get out right
as Twilight ends and especially once we get past full moon right because we're starting to get a bright moon right now
so again best time evening early and that's will remain true into the month
of March uh I just looked at it in my not
that big of binoculars but I looked at the comment about a week ago or so when the moon wasn't bright and I thought did
I see that thing in my finder scope because it looked bright enough you know and so I took the I have a pair of uh 8
by 40s and I put them up and I couldn't believe it there it was plainly visible at eighth magnitude just just a fuzzy
spot you know that's what comets look like through binoculars generally and it's currently 7.5 so it's gotten a
little bit brighter yet so one the moon is out of the sky if you're in a reasonably dark sky you should see Comet
Pon Brooks in a pair of binoculars but gosh in a telescope much better the
comet was discovered by Jean Louie pong back in 1812 July of that year still uh
the greatest visual comet hunter uh just using a telescope 37 discoveries he made and once we Pinn
down the orbit of this com Comet astronomers came to realize that hey this is the identical Comet that passed
by the Earth back in the year 1385 so ponds Brooks long before it had a name
back in the days when people thought comets were just a one-off thing U had
been seen as early as 1385 and possibly as early as the year 245 so it's been
making a lot of return appearances which is wonderful because it connects us these Cycles connect us to human history
we might imagine how people saw the comet back then by seeing it ourselves now you know these things are always
time machines for me comets although we don't have any
sketches at least none that I could find that the pond produced uh he never
nevertheless did describe it as nebulous without a tale it was not visible to the naked eye at least in July of that year
so this is a photograph current photograph of the Comet perhaps looks something like this through his
telescope where you could see a bright coma and a bright pseudo nucleus there
so he may have seen it somewhat more like that tailess next time it showed up was in
1883 when William Brooks spotted it and it's not like he was looking for it he
stumbled across it realized it was the same object as Pond had seen and so his
name was attached to it because he recovered he basically recovered the comet after first discovery so we call
it Comet Pon Brooks and during this Apparition is when things got more
exciting we get some more notes we get some beautiful drawings as well here's the comet in January 9th you see up here
and then January 12th and the difference between these drawings you'll notice is this is a much brighter area in the coma
and the nucleus and what we're seeing is one of those outbursts this is the first first Apparition in which an outburst
was recorded and as we'll learn this has become characteristic of this particular
Comet it shows up gets bright gets faint but in the middle of all of that it's showing these special outburst and
brightness the next time it came by we have all the apparitions here tonight
was back in 1953 in 1854 and these are some lovely sketches
by a British amateur astronomer George elcock some of you may know El Cox's
work and discoveries he discovered a co-discoverer of the Comet IRAs Iraqi
alcco back in 1983 which is still to me the comet that was I've never seen
anything move faster in the sky it covered the entire sky here from duth
over three nights it was there and the next three nights later was all the way over there and you could see it move in
real time through the telescope SC just amazing I'm sorry that's a bit of a tangent but he uh studied and made these
great drawings of uh Pon Brooks back in 1954 and there were two at least two
outbursts recorded where the comet brightened several magnitudes and by an outburst I mean you look one night and
the comet's a faint little mge the very next night 24 hours or fewer later the
comet is suddenly two three four magnitudes brighter I mean really all of
a sudden it's right there in your face when the night before you may have had to use averted Vision to see it that
brings us to the current appearance of comma 12p and here you can see its orbit
notice how the planets are all kind of in the same plane that Earth's orbit
defining the plane of the solar system the comet's orbit is typical for a comet in that it's very it's Ecentric in other
words it's departs from a circle and it also is very steep its inclination as
you can see down here is 74° it's period currently 71 years and check this out
recovered in June of 2020 that's how much technology has advanced since
1953 is that we can now find these objects at magnitude 23 four years practically in advance of
parhelion just amazing and you can see parhelion is coming up which is the
reason the comet is brightening it is approaching the sun more ice is vaporizing when you have more ice and
more dust in the picture you got lots more stuff to reflect sunlight so the comet's brightness is
intensifying it will after swings around the Sun in late April it will pass
closest to the earth on June 2nd not a particularly close approach but close enough so that it will maintain its
appearance in the evening Sky even after parah healing although uh beginning in late April through May it won't be
visible from the Northern Hemisphere it will be passed over to viewers in the southern hemisphere
only okay in the current Apparition and this is where things get even more
exciting I feel like I might have an outburst here right in front of you um back in July this comet on July
19th was 16th magnitude and you know that something that 16th magnitude is
like impossible B to see practically visually so no one was even trying for the comet no amateurs were really
looking overnight this Comet had an outburst and it jumped to 11th magnitude
got all that fresh dust that blasted away from the comet and that night I
think it was the night or the night after I had my telescope on it and where there was nothing the night before here
I saw this little fuzzy 11th magnitude star plain as day if I had had a 3-in
telescope I could have spotted it my favorite instrument is a 15-in dobsonian
reflector but you had to magnify it like 200 times and you can see oh it's not a
star there's some fuzz around it and that fuzz is the expanding coma and the
reason it looks so tiny at least in the beginning is because well look at its distance from the Sun 3.9 Aus at the
time that's almost four times the Earth Sun distance not quite the Jupiter but
getting there and here this thing was visible just like that in the night sky here's a bit of showing of the
eruption the evolution of the eruption over several days in July the coma here
you know after the Outburst is expanding at approximately 500 miles per hour and
I still can't believe it when I see these numbers but it was losing mass at the rate of about in that one Outburst
it lost an estimated 10 billion kilogram so you think well what's left well it's
a fairly significant object uh being about 18 19 miles across 30 kilometers
so it's got a lot to spare so here's the comet as it expanded
I bet all of you seen pictures of this online because it reminded people of a
few things I'm sure you're thinking oh yes it did remind me of something it
reminded me of the millennial falcon spaceship from the Star Wars series and
so you know I started seeing headlines you did too about the millennial Falcon Comet and by gosh it it really does
resemble it here when you set them side by side and then of course that morphed
into the devil Comet because by golly that is a much better headline even than
Millennial Falcon Comet and yes it did grow horns just like the devil so what's the deal with the horns
well if you look carefully in this special image taken with a A different kind of filter that really delineates
the Jets the material streaming out from the commet nucleus what's happening here
these horns form because the nucleus which is this little red dot right there
is shielding the ejected material from the expansion from that do so it's it's
it's it's blasting from the nucleus and then going around the Contour of it around the back so that's why the
nucleus itself I guess you could consider it like a potato and the material is streaming around the sides
and then it finds free space behind the nucleus and creates this horn like
appearance it's just fascinating isn't it you can't see the nucleus we have no photos of it because it's far too
distant no spacecraft has ever been there but we can sort of infer a little
bit that the nucleus might be elong elongated here are of course that was
the first Outburst right July 20th well once it got going you just couldn't stop
it it was like every few weeks this comet would Outburst so what would happen you'd see that bright starlike
appearance it would gradually grow into a large kind of a shell and then boom
another outburst would happen within the Shell at the very core so you'd see this little Stellar dot inside a shell and
you can see the sequence here the November one through mid November
and it might seem a little paradoxical but the comet is brighter in appearance to your eye when it's smaller because
all of that light let's say it's 11th magnitude or 10th all of that light is concentrated in a point and so it's easy
to pick up you could take that same amount of light and you puff it out into a big um expanding coma and overall to
your eye it Maks much fainter I made a sketch I thought I got
to draw this uh there was an outburst in late November and the coma had been
expanding from the previous Outburst for several weeks so it was very distended
it was big and faint and then right in the middle of it boom another outburst
so it just had this you saw both extremes at the same time this is really
the joy of following comets they're out there they're always changing even ones
that don't do the fancy dance like Comet ponds Brooks but it's this continual
change and sometimes not knowing what to expect and with Pon Brooks you don't know you might be the first one to
witness an outburst or to record it photographically uh I would get news on
Comet lists about hey we got another outburst just spotted in Europe and I couldn't wait for the night sky to clear
to see it again to see it from my backyard this is a graph from the uh French comic group uh Lake comt and you
can see here we got a light curve along the bottom is uh the the
dates and on the left side we have magnitude there's the first Outburst
notice okay it was 16th magnitude shot up to 11 then it just dropped back down
shot up shot up shot and it's been doing it nonstop so I suspect we have more
outbursts in the offing so I think this is a really wonderful comment to find
I'd like to talk just for a couple of minutes about maybe what the cause we don't know the exact cause we know that
comets Sublime right they go from when they're near the Sun the solid material
goes from solid like you see here with the dry ice to gas to Vapor we know that
but there's more at work here with Comet ponds Brooks and for that we a little
closer look at what happens at comets that are heated by the Sun let's get as
close as we can go which is the Magnificent European space agency's Rosetta probe which spent a couple of
years at Comet 67p chumo Gasco back in 2014 through about 2016 a little Beyond
and this look at this beautiful closeup of this Comet it's this is the rubber duck one you can see it has a neck and
the top and bottom and all of this material is streaming away
from the comet some from the surface of the Comet but some of that material especially the sharply directed geyser
likee Jets this material is coming from beneath the surface and being funneled
out there's another view again we have solar heating vaporizing this dustr ice
and there you see the origin right there from that little spot of the material that will eventually form the coma and
form the two different type of tales of comets that make them so beautiful to look
at in a very very fortuitous circumstance uh the Rosetta spacecraft
happened to pass directly over a jet on July 3rd 2016 in the impot region of the
Comet it was releasing tons of material into space from beneath and it
discovered that some of those Jets the source of them are these little
Impressions here you can see one there and one there and the blue coloring uh tells us it's just deliberately covered
colored blue that tells us that that's water ice there those areas are rich in water ice so Jets can form from water
ice they can form from carbon monoxide ice all different kinds of sources of
ices and this is my very favorite sequence taken by Rosetta when
a comet ejects that dust you know for from a fissure from a
hole up into space lots of it does go out into space but some of it falls back
to the surface of the Comet almost like snow and that's what you're seeing here that's as if you could stand on Comet
67p or for that matter any Comet and just look around you at all the dust
flying around in the sunlight just incredible I thought you might want to
look at the dust more closely so this is a photograph also taken by Rosetta of dust that was collected from chimos
Gasco we've got organ material that kind of has silicates in it sand is made of
silicates we got silicates and carbonaceous material organic Rich
compounds so what is the cause of the bright Outburst we can understand that a comet will brighten it as it approaches
the Sun and Ice vaporizes heating of the Comet causes
Jets material to leave the surface it also heats the interior that sunlight
strikes the comet surface and also penetrates down into the interior where it can vaporize ice there and that
vaporized ice that vapor is now gas is under pressure and it's seeking a way to
release it needs to get out and if it finds a crack in the comet's crust it'll
shoot out and form those very sharp looking Jets you saw the earlier images of comet
67p we don't know the exact mechanism for it certainly not for 12p but we
suspect thing that drives Outburst from a different Comet maybe some of you have
observed this one it's called 29 schwas vman the nucleus is Hu huge
it's 37 mil across it orbits about the distance of
Jupiter in
a circular orbit takes
about years and this comet
has and you could watch that coma expand before your eyes night after night after
night well uh Richard miles with the British astronomical Association the vaa
has carefully studied this Comet written a couple of papers about a possible mechanism for outbursts and what applies
here may indeed apply to 12p so we have this cutaway of of a comet that's a comet's
nucleus there and I added in some various types of IES that you would find inside of it uh primarily there's a lot
of water ice there again is the carbon dioxide ice remember these things when they're far away I mean they they are
made of primordial materials that have been around forever and it's kept under a crust and so that Ice is like really
in an ice box of the outer solar system so you've got this stuff protected inside this uh crust so water methane
hydrogen sulfide there's methanol ice ammonia ice CH4 again is methane and so
forth inside the comet and what Richard miles thinks is happening here is that
as the sun heats the surface of this Comet and I should mention one other
important thing this Comet takes 57 days approximately to make one rotation so
pictured very slow so one half of the comet is in Shadow it's nighttime and
bitter cold then that part of the Comet rotates around into sunlight and it stays in sunlight for many days days
during that very lengthy time heat can be transferred beneath the surface which
can cause the methane the CH4 which is in ice form to actually
melt and then when it melts it absorbs the co and the CO2 the carbon monoxide
material it dissolves inside the melting methane sounds crazy what's happening
inside this thing it dissolves in that methane releases heat which makes the
methane even warmer which absorbs more of this material and melts it producing
gas it vaporizes as it gets mixed in with the melting methane and that Vapor
concentration goes up and up and up and up until it must seek release it's like
you know it's got It's got a severe case of gas and it's got to get out of there and so it either finds a crack in the
surface or it could actually blow a hole through the surface almost like a volcano which is why this particular
type of U mechanism is called cryo volcanism so it can break through a
softer region of the Comet softened by the way by the heat of the Sun and then
blast for some amount of time get rid of that um gases that have formed as these
various ises have mixed together and melt so that creates This brilliant jet tons
of material get spread around the comet it's an outburst it's very very
bright then as the comet continues to rotate back
into right
that wound that scar it rotates around again into the sunlight the heat works
its way through that carbon acious material vaporizes portions of it
cycle starts again so we had these repeated Cycles we don't know for sure but it
appears that comma 12p ALS has a lengthy rotation period if
similar to what goes on on 29p and yes this is this is my demonstration of what
it looks like there at the comet when next time you pop a bottle of champagne you can imagine what's going on the lid
is off and all that bubbly is shooting out into
space there are some true record Breakers among outbursts in com in the
com it went from invisible like something blast in from
the interior we think a chunk of the Comet actually broke off and exposed so much fresh ice and dust
that comet's magnitude leapt 15 magnitudes it went from like total invisibility to just a bright star and
then it continued to expand over the coming days and weeks really a magnificent site to watch this Comet the
next time you bite into a piece of candy I'm always looking for Earthly analogies to what we see in the cosmos but but um
whatever this candy is that sort of resembles what's inside these coms in
terms of all the different kinds of ices in there and the things that can happen when you add that essential ingredient
solar heating let's take a look uh coming weeks and coming couple of months what's
going to happen with the comet well I think we can expect more Outburst but the comet is also getting closer and
closer to the Sun and the Earth so its magnitude has been gradually
climb and this is from excellent Comet guy and the latest graph shows that the
comet will reach a peak magnitude of around 4.5 in early
a April so that means that if you keep track of it you can watch it get
brighter from 7.5 now where it's visible in binocular five it is worth going to
the country side for so that you can get a view of with the naked eye it will be faint but this should become a naked eye
Comet and let's say we get really lucky and it has a bright Outburst on top of it who knows maybe it would become third
magnitude maybe even brighter than third magnitude we'll have to just wait and
watch here's the path showing you uh from February through
March to April very good thing happened happens here in April the comet as I'll
show you in the next slide gets low in Twilight by April so you're going to need a very good Western Horizon so if
you don't have that now the best thing is is to you know use Google Earth Google Maps and find a place where you
have a reasonably dark view to the West close down to the Horizon to make the most of this occasion I you won't get
another chance for another 71 years and I don't know about you but I'm sure I won't be
here so here's the comet I picked a really Scenic evening for viewing the comet if
you face West at dusk on April 10th the comet will be near its peak magnitude
and check it out it's right by the planet Jupiter so you can just look at
Jupiter take your binoculars and move them down to the Comet or your telescope
and the moon on that particular evening will be a two-day Crescent so man oh man I'm hoping it'll be clear this is 2 days
after the total solar Eclipse so if you're still down in Texas or if you happen to be in Kansas where I hear the
Western Horizons are pretty dog on good then you're in the right place for viewing this
event uh we did talk beforehand just casually about seeing the eclipse of the sun maybe some of you are old enough to
remember doing this this is a 1963 Eclipse I remember I made a cardboard box and put it over my head
for all I know that's what got me interested in astronomy this was taken in Illinois small
school but here's a map showing you where the comet will be during totality
and I I've heard talk and I've seen diagrams showing This Magnificent brilliant comet in the sky
with the total eclipse thinking oh no please don't do that because of the
expectations those of you who have been to eclipses know that yes you can see Venus during totality and yeah you'll
see Jupiter too but to see the comet assuming no major Outburst you'd have to
be able to see a second magnitude star at the very least and this is hamal in
the constellation of Aries at 2.0 that'll be near the comet at least I
mean it might be fun to try with binoculars you'll spot Jupiter so you can point your binoculars at Jupiter if
you've got a few seconds to spare and swing over to see if you might just be able to find the comet
I think it's really iffy fourth magnitude H maybe photographically
developed so it might be worth training a camera there and just doing kind of a sequence of exposures just on the
intervalometer let it go and see what you get so here's the comet now recent
picture taken by Dan Bartlett excellent Comet photographer uh on February 12th
and here you can see that the comet has developed two tails we have have the ion
tail from that carbon monoxide and then over here look at this
it's curving off to the right a little bit that and it's slightly yellow that's the dust
tail through my telescope I looked at the comet again about a week ago and I
could see that northward pointing part of the tail I believe I was seeing the dust tail so it is lengthening all the
time that ion tail is getting really long so
in addition to watching for outbursts there's all this other thing stuff happening the brightening uh of the coma
and the lengthening of the Tails just so much uh to be grateful for and to enjoy
in the night sky and this is my last slide uh if you're interested you can
screen grab this take a picture of it but one thing you'll want to keep a
breast of any comment and things happening with 12p in particular this is
a great site uh the S site here called the weekly information about bright
comets I live there I parttime live there at that site the other site I
part-time live at is the common observation database cobes great place
amateurs everywhere submitting their uh magnitude estimates of all the currently visible comets uh and if you dig down
into it you'll also see lots of other information if you are a Facebook user
a lot of comet people hang out on Comet watch and share their photos nightly all
the time so you want to see what the comment looks like like right now just go to this Facebook page and finally if
you want to participate in trying to unravel the mystery of what causes the
Outburst of 12p you can contribute your data magnitudes observations and
photographs to the Comm Chasers group that's uh over in the UK and that's at
Comet Chasers dorg and that's all I have so I'll come
back is there any questions oh let's Scott look thank you
Bob you answered one of the questions I've had people come up and ask me about the comet and the eclipse and you know I
I tell them all don't really waste your time not looking at totality because
that is the main thing but I said the same thing if you could a camera over towards Jupiter and just let it go that
doesn't hurt but don't waste that valuable totality time yeah I I agree unless the comet
were to like have a five magnitude outburst and be minus two then it would just be a spectical but you know how
comets are um I think David had the great quote on the Comets about cats or something but you just don't know what
to expect with them so if it's Fourth magnitude yeah not going to see do you
think that uh there'll be astrophotographers that will um try
doing a long exposure maybe overexposing um yeah you know Parts just
to try to get the comet uh and then maybe doing a U you know
superimposed image of where the comet is over the is would that be a technique
that uh yeah I think you're right Scott I think and that's I guess if I was shooting it that's what I would do too
is I would just put SE camera and do one of those um what do they call it where
you just uh program the camera to shoot a sequence of different exposures right you're not thinking about it and I would
overexpose exactly I'm guessing if you did that you'd probably get a little coma before the sky would be get too
bright but you might indeed be able to record the comet I think I think someone will do
it so Darlene Davis is watching on Facebook and and Darlene says will the
yet create a force on the comet yeah oh Darlene you got it you know exactly
exactly that's why Comet orbital periods and exactly where there are is some
always needs a little adjustment because yes there is pressure put on the comet
you know as the jet is released which does alter the comet's orbit slightly so
over time we always have to recalculate these orbits so we know precisely where they are it's called a non-gravitational
force and it definitely plays a role in where the comet is and where it will be
so you have to keep close track of it especially with really active comets like this
one excellent well that's great we know that you have another lecture to go to um y
so thank you on here yeah well thank thank you very much it looks it looks
like I I made it in just in just time here so it worked out well thank you Bob
we really appreciate you taking the time tonight to spend with us and I loved your talk and that was some great
information thank you very much thank you Terry it was a blast I really appreciate it you got you guys all take
care and and happy Comet hunting you take care be safe all right thanks Bob
all right thank you bye bye bye all right yeah Bob had another um engagement
to get to to give another talk so appreciate the time that he took to be here uh so why don't we go to Carol
Carol it looks like you being and Scott are left here so Carol would you kind of give us an update on everything and
anything you would like to sounds good I'm gonna share my screen here Terry
sure go all right I love that logo yeah logo it's so cool
yeah yeah our person who designed that Marsha young she wanted to get the purple and the greens that was her thing
so yeah that's she's our newsletter editor as well so we're going to Kansas
City for Alcon 2024 and on July 17th through the 20s
the big event we have feveral several featured speakers if you look there on the left toon Alexander theoretical
physicist and cosmologist from Brown University he's also a jazz saxophonist
and he's probably going to join the uh the Jazz Band we're going to have at the
banquet on Saturday night and play along with them and also David's already left
tonight but he's going to be one of our main uh persones there as well as
Speaker he'll be uh uh being he will have a special event at Linda Hall
library on uh THS no Friday night uh no
Thursday night they're run together at this point so that that's going to be something you can really look forward to
uh as many of you know David's collection of his observing papers and
logs for the Comets he's observed are there at Linda Hall in addition David's
first telescope is there so that should be a real unique experience uh our guests will also get
to go into the rare book room and actually hold some venage books original
copies in many cases of of a very rare astronomy books so that's something to
look forward to in addition Tim Russ who is an actor musician screenwriter director and an AM
astronomer of course he uh was famous from his work with the uh Star Trek uh
that series he'll be there he's also a jazz musician so I don't know what they're going to cook up between them
all but that should be fun and finally Kavon Sten professor of physics and
astronomy from Vanderbilt would be there and plus we will be having uh uh several
in place in the person as well as we'll be streaming several talks as well as
far as the evening events we go ahead Terry oh I did
yeah didn't say anything okay I just he yeah so it looks like we're heading
to the Planetarium and we got the starbq pal Observatory I I really
enjoyed pal Observatory the last time we did the starbq out there if I remember right last time that is correct uh this
time we decided to go to theh Botanical Gardens there in Overland Park and so
we're going to be there for an hour and a half or so then we're going to go on down to palser atory have a speaker one
of our youth speakers in fact uh in fact I think uh she has been on this broadcast way back when
cetti last yeah so she's gonna be our feature speaker out there she always gives an engaging talk I think she's
about halfway through her studies at uh the University of Kansas so she's always a very good speaker always on The
Cutting Edge of of her research uh we have several vendors there and including
dayar Builders and uh Scott thank you for uh being there as well explore
scientific we have few others I'm sure and that's what we know at this point our goal is to have registration live at
the end of this month February we're going to be very close and we're working feverishly trying to get that together
and it's very it'll be there very soon and we'll be announcing it all over uh the place and all the social media sites
when that happens so where will the banquet be at it will be
at the hotel at the Double Tree yeah okay all right so that's what I know at
this point and very soon registration will be open in fact the paper
registration form is ready now but we're going to put it on line first before we release it uh at that time will they be
taking reservations at the hotel when the registration comes online that is correct in fact uh if you uh well I
won't go any further we don't have it on here but it's actually open right now and I probably should put that uh by the
March 1 meeting I'll have that information on here so everybody can see it okay sounds good well thank you Carol
I appreciate that it's always good to get an update on what's going on and everybody's looking forward to this it
uh just having a jazz band at the banquet will be really a lot of fun yeah I think it will be and of
course Kan is known for its Jazz among other things and so we hope to have a a great great tenant on that yeah Jazz and
barbecue huh I know when I came out there everybody took us all out to barbecue restaurant so yeah everybody
has their own favorite I have mine but I won't say it publicly here I understand well as Carol said
mentioned we are going to be back in just a couple of weeks and hopefully
this will go to the large and large there we are Chuck Allen is going to be our speaker for the March first at 7 pm
EST Eastern Standard Time um he will be speaking about faster than seeing faster
than lied objects which ought to be a lot of fun too Chuck is another person
that can do fantastic talks we've heard him on the GSP many times and at Alcon
uh so we look forward to that on March 1 and uh in April we're not going to be
having one because so many of us will be traveling for the eclipse NE a little bit of everything so um and we will be
at NE too uh Carol Chuck and I all three and Scott will be there with explore
scientific yep we'll all be at NE too so stop by and see all of us and with that
this is going to be a short Al live be since we needed to do the speaker first
so thank you all for joining us Carol thank you for being here and Bob and
David if they were here Scott you know thanks everybody and thank all of you for being out there to watch I hope you
enjoyed Bob's talk as much as we all did that was some good information about the comet little bit about the eclipse
because I H have had a lot of questions you know will the comet be right there when it's total and we can see it yeah
you know put a camera on it don't lose your time on totality so Scott I think I
will turn this back to you to close it up and thank you again everybody all right thank you thanks a lot well uh
that is wraps up another astronomical League live program uh and as Terry said
uh uh April will be many of us will be absent running around the country um
attending events but I hope to do some live broadcasting actually from the Northeast astronomy Forum itself and I
hope to also drag some of the people because they're not going to be too far away from the explore scientific booth
uh we'll grab some people from the astronomical League Booth to say hello anyways uh you guys have a great weekend
and uh on Tuesday we have the 142nd Global Star Party um uh featuring
uh all your favorites so uh as our old friend Jack corer used to say keep
looking up and uh we'll see you uh Tuesday on February 20th take care
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
w