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Comet 3I/ATLAS: Move along. Nothing to see here.

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Despite all the sensational headlines you may read on the internet, Comet 3I/ATLAS remains an unremarkable object in the morning sky. My animated GIF above, taken on December 9th, shows a tiny little comet-like object moving past a background star over a period of about 7 minutes. The planetarium software that I use, Cartes du Ciel, indicated that 3I/ATLAS was around 15th magnitude. I think it looks a little brighter than that, but I have to admit that whatever its official magnitude is, 3I/ATLAS is getting a lot more attention and hype than it deserves! I didn't go to the trouble of converting pixel counts to stellar magnitudes, but the line graph feature in MaxIM DL CCD software shows that the brightness of 3I/ATLAS maxes out at around 9,100 counts. My camera has a 16-bit digitizer, so the display range for each pixel is from 0 to 65,535, with 0 being representing black and 65,535 representing white. In a 15-second exposure, the brightest pixels in 3I/ATLAS are only 14% of full p...
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Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS)

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While Comet 3I/ATLAS steals all the headlines, a much better-looking comet, officially dubbed "C/2025 K1 (ATLAS)" is quietly passing over us to the north, on its way back toward the far reaches of the solar system. Although K1 ATLAS had remarkably close fly-bys of Venus and Mercury on the inbound portion of its journey around the sun, nobody has accused it of being an alien spacecraft, setting its own course, and trying to collect information about our solar system. Both of these comets have at least one thing in common. They're both called "ATLAS" because they were discovered by the same survey group known as "Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System" (or, ATLAS). A lot of comets, in fact, share that name, because ATLAS has been a very prolific discovery machine! Remember, for instance,  Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS ? That one was co-discovered by China's Purple Mountain Observatory and ATLAS. Incidentally, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS also had a very...
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3I/ATLAS before closest approach to earth

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  What a weird comet, eh? Here's my shot, taken this morning at around 5 o'clock. Close inspection of the image reveals somewhat of a tail pointing upward, and somewhat of another tail pointing downward. Tail and anti-tail? Perhaps. But keep in mind that we're viewing the comet such that its tails may be pointing away from us, regardless of which side of the comet they appear to be on from our perspective.  Of course, the odd shape of Comet 3I/ATLAS is just one more of several alleged anomalies that conspiracy theorists have pointed to in an effort to persuade us that it's not a comet at all, but rather a space probe sent by aliens from a distant star system to gather information about us or to attack us.  Whatever! I don't believe there's anything artificial about 3I/ATLAS. For one thing, it's come a long way and has to have traveled a very long time across the galaxy. It is likely older than our solar system, meaning that if it was launched by aliens, they...
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Tale of two comets

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  You may have seen the online hype this month over two comets that are currently gracing our nighttime skies. We backyard astronomers are, of course, enjoying the views of these comets using our binoculars and telescopes, but we also know that they are far from being "Great Comets," much less being worthy of such widespread coverage by the news media. After all, any comet that one can only barely see with a pair of binoculars is not a comet that non-astronomers will appreciate. I, for example, might look at these comets using my 8x42 binoculars, and say, "Nice!" But if I were to hand my binoculars to a neighbor who knows nothing about backyard astronomy, they would do their best to follow my instructions as to where to look, and ultimately say, "I don't see anything," before handing the binoculars back to me. Now, you take, for instance Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS that was in our skies almost exactly one year ago. That was a much better comet than eithe...
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(4597) Consolmagno

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Consolmagno.  Consolmagno? Where have I heard that name before? Oh, yeah! That's the Vatican Observatory guy, right?  Right!! Guy Consolmagno, according to Wikipedia, "is an American research astronomer, physicist, religious brother, director of the Vatican Observatory, and President of the Vatican Observatory Foundation." He has quite the pedigree. Wikipedia says that he "attended the University of Detroit Jesuit High School before he obtained his S.B. (1974) and S.M. (1975) degrees at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. (1978) at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, all in planetary science." You can look him up on Wikipedia yourself, but I'll add here that Wikipedia says, "Known as 'The Pope's Astronomer,' he was named by Pope Francis to be the Director of the Vatican Observatory in September 2015." Oh, and one more thing from Wikipedia, "An asteroid was named in his honour by the Inter...
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Asteroid Belgica and the First World War

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Sometimes when I'm searching for supernovae, my telescope-pointing software reveals an asteroid in the area of my target galaxy. If it's a brighter asteroid, and if there is something appealing about the naming of the asteroid, I'll take a detour from my primary interest and grab some images of the asteroid. Other times, I might come across in my reading a reference to an asteroid that was named after a famous person or place, which makes me want to seek out and get an image of the asteroid to add to my collection. This requires that I do a little homework to determine the best viewing window of the asteroid, which often requires waiting up to a year or more. I typically mark these on my kitchen calendar, so that I'll have a reminder. My image above, of asteroid (1052) Belgica, falls under the category of the latter. As discussed in my post about Terence Dickinson last year, there are thousands of famous persons who have been honored by naming minor planets after them,...
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Planetary Nebula M1-64 (PK64+51.1)

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A YouTuber (Tsula's Big Adventures) recently posted a video about trying to find a small planetary nebula known as M1-64, an object that she referred to as "The Little Ring Nebula." She made several attempts to find it with various telescopes, and when she finally was able to see it through the eyepiece of her 15-inch Dobsonian, she made a sketch (above, left side). I was curious about M1-64, so I took a picture of it tonight (right side), to find out what it looks like in my 12-inch telescope. I added the lines to some asterisms to make the comparison between her sketch and my photo easier. The sketch Tsula made of the starfield surrounding M1-64 is quite good, but it reveals some of the pitfalls of astrosketching. Many years ago, whenever you'd come across an amateur astronomer's sketch of a celestial object in the astronomy magazines, it usually would be accompanied by a photograph of the same object. But often times, the emulsion-based photograph was a deep (o...
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