Not sure it's "old" eyes, but it is the eyes. With your eyes looking through binos, everything is dark and you irises open up that extra millimeter that makes seeing Lovejoy so easy, but laying on your back, the extra light from all around you shuts those irises just enough. Patrick was still in his observatory where a lot of extra light sources in Stansbury were still blocked. You were in the open in St. George, plenty of extra light sources nearby. That's my theory at least. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave Gary" <davegary@me.com> To: "Utah Astronomy" <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Friday, January 23, 2015 4:11:39 AM Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Love joy naked eye You’ve got better vision than me. Must be all those carrots. I laid down in the driveway observatory night-before-last and did, basically, the same thing you did (minus the airplanes). No go. I couldn’t make out anything naked-eye. I couldn’t even conjure an image naked-eye with averted vision. Must be all that exposure from work or old eyes or both. Strange, it’s so bright in my binoculars and they’re 7X35. Dave On Jan 22, 2015, at 21:38, Wiggins Patrick <paw@getbeehive.net> wrote:
Was just out looking at the comet with 10x50s and it seemed bright enough that it might be visible naked eye. So I lay down on my observatory floor for several minutes waiting for my eyes to dark adapt. Funny but during that time I saw two airplanes fly right through the Pleiades.
Once adapted I used the binocs to find the comet again so I'd know right where to look.
No luck looking straight at it but with averted vision there was definitely something there and the longer I looked the more obvious it became.
So, my first (barely) naked eye comet in quite some time.
patrick
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