What was it like to see the comet NEOWISE?
I only heard about comet NEOWISE after it dissapeared and I'm wondering what it looked like? I can see pictures of it online, but I don't think they can possible capture exact how it must have felt to witness such a beautfiul sight. Can anyone tell me what it was like beyond just the visual?
Answers ( 1 )
Comets are tough. Yes, they're sometimes visible without binoculars or a telescope -- but usually, it's just barely so. You need to be somewhere dark, and you have to know just where to look (which is made much easier with phone apps, etc.), and you kinda have to know what to look for.
The photos you see of NEOWISE are decidedly not what you will see with the naked eye. My wife and I live in the suburbs of a small city, which (fortunately) is in the opposite direction from where the comet was in the northern sky. Even so, we got the binoculars out and took turns trying to figure out what to look for. Once it was dark enough, we spotted it -- a fuzzy, grey blob that kinda pointed down and to the left. I tried to find a similar image on the web -- but what we saw was worse than anything I could find. :-)
But that's not really what it's about. The point of searching out things like comets in the sky is just seeing them with your own eyes. It's different. It's a little discovery, even if it's in crappy 320x480 definition, you know? As I said to my wife, "it's headed away from us and it won't be back for 6,800 years".
Watching the International Space Station pass overhead is a similar experience. It's just a bright dot that sort of glides across the sky -- nothing special, except you think "there are six people riding on that dot!" That's where the awe comes from.
I have an 8" telescope and we love to look at Saturn. We don't get to see this:
We see this:
But we see it with our own eyes. It's different. It's magical.