Fine analysis, Chuck. It is interesting but certainly not a great comet and not even a very good comet. It's nice to see if you can. -- Joe ------------------------------ On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 8:32 AM MDT Chuck Hards wrote:

I was reading Joe's SLAS blast on the comet and have some thoughts.

This isn't a "Great Comet", by any means, actually it's not even a "good" comet. I guess once you see a Great comet such as Bennett or West, others pale in comparison. Certainly Hale-Bopp was pretty spectacular, even if a bit shy of "Great" status, and Hyakutake was in a league of it's own. The longest comet I've ever seen, but ghostly pale and almost eerie. I'd even put Ikeya-Zhang above PanSTARRS. That said, we don't see naked-eye comets (or those verging on naked-eye visibility) very often (at least in the northern hemisphere lately- what's up with that?) so even these little guys are kind of special to us.

I do think that we as a community tend to go overboard when dealing with the press, and especially so with comets. Anybody who's been doing this for a while knows that comet visibility predictions, even though based on data and carefully plotted brightness curves- are no better than rolling dice. I think press releases on things like this should wait until such time as a comet is actually big and bright enough for the general public to see and recognize as something special. As astronomers, we get excited over little nebulous puffs, but the general public do not. I wonder if sometimes we do ourselves and our hobby a disservice by promoting the average or below-par (from the public's viewpoint). Crying Wolf isn't really the right analogy, I think in the public eye we come off more like cosmic Dead-Heads. Fans who follow our band everywhere and are completely consumed by it. Well, most of us are, but a lot of what we get excited about just won't ever really infect 99.99% of the public the way it infected us.

I plan on going to SPOC tonight because a comet is a comet, and these little ones have their own charms. Also I won't have to contend with the neighbor's patio lights until ten PM.

A "Great Comet" is something that we only get to witness a very few times during a lifetime, if we are lucky. So I'll get my fix with this little guy and bide my time for the next really knock-your-socks-off comet.

(Gets down off soap-box) _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy

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