Comets and Meteors!

I had a great session with the 8.5" Dob. Looked at 73P SW3 fragments C and B. WOW!!! C is a beautiful bright healthy looking comet. It looks the way a comet should look. Nicely placed in the same FOV as Alpha CrB sporting a well condensed stellar coma and a beautiful bright dust tail which i reckoned extended for 2 full moon diameters (1*) to the SW!

I also seen fragment B..WOW again..this comet looks like it is on death row, it just looked like a faint diffuse patch elongated in the anti - solar direction with an elongated soft smudge for a coma. It was difficult to tell were the coma ended and the tail began..its cool to watch a comet dying in real time!

Had a quick peak at A1 Pojmanski near Beta Cass..not much to see but a tiny fuzzy speck in a rich star field.

Conor and i then done a pre dawn Lyrid watch. We seen 19 meteors, several of which were absolute beauties at mag - 2.0 trailing across 70* of sky. We seen a rusty Virginid travel slowly across the sky for 5 secs burning out near Jupiter. Just about all the meteors we seen were of very high quality along with several mag - 4.0 Irdium flares. I finnished the session with a comet hunt in the morning twilight. Session ended at 04.40.

Looking forward to the peak tonight!!

Was waiting for gaps in clouds last night to have another look at 73P. It has been v cloudy in killarney of late, hopefully tonight will be clear. What magnitude would you reckon B is now.

Hi

Possibly around mag 9 or so but C is clearily 8th mag as it has been observed in 10X50 binos. It should be brightening rapidly now. Dont know whats happening with B. There seems to be some confusion as to whether it is breaking up or not...guess we will know soon enough.

Hope the sky clears for you. Crystal clear here at minute.