Comet C/2021 A1 Leonard

 

Sketch of the comet, when I finally saw it.

 

 

A few days ago I went out to try to find the comet. I left my yard, travelled across another set of back yards and front yards to get to a street with a better treeline, and stared for like 30 minutes with binoculars, trying to find the comet. And I succeeded! I even found it again, by accident, when I returned to my yard. (the asterism i used was gone, so i couldn't repeat my fluke recovery)

Sky conditions have been pretty bad lately so it wasn't until today, the 22nd, that I could actually go back out and try to find the meteor. Looking at the position of the comet in Stellarium, I figured i'd be able to see it from my yard more easily this time. I went out at about 5:40 with my Zhumell Z130 OTA on a Vixen Porta Mount & Tripod (which, being fairly tall, would see slightly higher above the trees), and a 16mm Nagler eyepiece. It took a while of just scanning around in the rough viscinity with the 8x40 finderscope I'd attached before it even got dark enough to see reference stars. And once I'd found reference stars, it took a while for the comet to come out of the twilight. Once I finally found it, at 6:04 PM I went back inside for another couple eyepieces.

 

This is a great comet! Watching it sort of fade in out of the twilight over the course of several minutes was quite fun. Looks great in binoculars too!

 

 sorry for not posting anything for the better part of a year! There's been plenty to talk about, but I guess since I've been doing so much writing for AstronomySource, and now I'm back volunteering at the Cline Observatory, my motivation to share logs has decreased somewhat.

So much has happened that I don't think I'll ever really get around to talking about it all, so here's a brief overview:

*  In the summer, the Cline Observatory re-opened! We're not using the CDK24 in the dome still, because of beurocratic and public health reasons, but we use 8" Dobsonians outside on the pad.

* In the summer, I went to a Bortle 4 site for the first time and gawked at the milky way instead of doing much sketching/logging. I'm sure real dark sites are spectacular, but seeing the fantastic detail in the Milky Way even there was phenomenal. Not to mention like, 8 naked-eye Deep-Sky-Object detections.

* Lots of cool and a few mediocre astronomical sketches, some of which haven't even been photographed.

* One special wednesday night observing session we did for night classes, but which was so well organized that we had 200 people come and look at the Moon, Saturn, and Jupiter!

* Trying to repair a 16" Meade Starfinder EQ Newtonian belonging to the observatory.

* The november 2021 lunar eclipse! That was a really cool thing to stay up for.

* Staying up in the bitter cold counting meteors during the spectacular Geminids to try to compile a scientific record for the IMO.

* Probably a few more experiences I will have totally forgotten because I never blogged them and only have relatively dry notes about.