Monday, February 23, 2009

Comet Lulin Visble Through Binoculars


A double tailed comet named Lulin will be visible through binoculars this week if you know when and where to look. If you look east-southeast in the sky at 9pm the comet should be very close to Saturn. It will follow a path between Saturn and the bright star, Regulus in the constellation Leo from February 23-27. Here is a link to Sky And Telescope .com that can give you more details. I plan to search for it tonight.

From what I heard on NPR, the comet was discovered by a 19 year old student in China. The comet is unusual in that it has a tail at both ends. It is also traveling around the sun in a direction opposite that of the planets in our solar system
.

8 comments:

Lynne at Hasty Brook said...

Cool!!!
We'll be looking!

Kim said...

I will be looking too!

Larry said...

The skies turned cloudy here in CT.-I'll try again Tuesday Night.

Anonymous said...

Will have to look for this Comet!

Jayne said...

Very cool!!

Lana Gramlich said...

Definitely going to be looking for this. Thanks for the info!

Mary said...

Thanks for the tip, Larry! I hadn't heard about it until now.

Larry said...

I was able to find it with binoculars-It was actually better viewed at 10 pm because of darker skies. It looked like a fuzzy snowball.The darker the skies in you area-the better the view you'll have. My spotting scope was good eough for picking up slight shape of rings on Saturn but no good for the comet.-Binoculars worked better.