A comet hunter, too?
Cartes du Ciel, the planetarium software I use, identified the interloper as Comet C/2022 E2 ATLAS. The date within the name indicates that this comet was discovered two years ago. You might wonder why I am just now getting around to seeing it.
Well, comets are movers. No, they don't go zipping across the sky like meteors. They move more slowly, like the planets and asteroids do. If you follow them for an hour, or so, you'll detect their motion against the background stars. If you catch them inbound but way out beyond Jupiter's orbit, you can continue following them for months. And when a comet reaches the inner solar system, the heat of the sun will cause its surface to melt a little and allow gas and dust to escape and produce a long tail. Sometimes they even become visible to the unaided eye, like Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS did earlier this year.
You might recall spying on Tsuchinshan-ATLAS on a few evenings in October. Night after night, we watched it shrink, fade, and drift eastward. And then it vanished from view. Not completely. It faded as it headed back out into the outer solar system, because it got further away from the sun's heat and the outgassing slowed. Its fuzzy coma and tail will eventually disappear, causing it to look more like an asteroid again. It might do some photobombing of a few galaxies, too, before it finally is too far away for backyard telescopes to pick up.
Comet C/2022 E2 ATLAS, on the other hand, didn't put on much of a show as it rounded the sun. Neither did it gather much of a following amongst backyard sky gazers. I never bothered to take a picture of it. Until last night, by an accidental coincidence, as it passed directly between me and galaxy IC 342.
There is an interesting message to backyard telescope enthusiasts embedded in the name of C/2022 E2 ATLAS. No, I'm not trying to promote a new crack-pot conspiracy theory! It's a legitimate message, if you'll hear me out.
In 2022, when the ATLAS team discovered this comet, there was another event that probably went unnoticed by the average person. Earth's human population reached 8 billion. That's your clue regarding the first half of the message.
The second-half clue lies within the acronym ATLAS. It represents an asteroid-detection system currently comprised of 4 telescopes, each of which can image one quarter of the entire observable sky, four times every night.
The clear message to me, at least, is, "There is a lot of competition out there, and there are powerful robots." Anyone who might consider getting into backyard astronomy should ponder that message.
If you think, for instance, that you're going to get yourself a sweet little telescope and imaging system (count on spending at least US $5000) so that you can start taking the best astrophotos ever, well, you've got an unfathomable amount of competition out there!
Similarly, if you're hoping to become famous by discovering a comet, asteroid, or supernova, your chances are, once again, slim to none, thanks to all the automated professional systems like ATLAS that can record the entire sky in one night and automatically find objects that are too dim for most backyard telescopes to detect.
The message is not intended to discourage people from becoming backyard telescope enthusiasts. It should be viewed only as a warning or caution. It may also put you on the proper course for your journey. A journey that could last a lifetime.
In my opinion, the most entertaining thing about astronomy is not found amongst the fabulous pictures taken by HST and JWST. Nor is it seen in the countless online photos and YouTube videos posted by amateur astronomers. **Yawn!**
No, I think the most entertaining thing about astronomy is its long and storied history. Rather than try to compete with the millions of other backyard telescope enthusiasts out there, all trying to take the best astrophoto ever and get featured on APOD, I'd much rather spend my leisure time walking in the footsteps of our astronomical forebears.
How many hundred-thousands of years and generations of humans did it take to produce the first telescopic views of the sun, moon, and planets? How long did it take astronomers to unlock the secrets of comets? How long did it take them to discover the fainter objects beyond our solar system, and to recognize that we live inside a galaxy, and that there are other galaxies besides ours? In addition to an immense amount of time, solving puzzles like these required thousands of brilliant minds, tenacious observers, and loads of good luck!
And yet, everyone who can afford a telescope today, even a modest telescope, can conduct the same observations as all the well-known astronomers from previous centuries. That's what I'm talkin' about!
Like Galileo, you can point your telescope at Jupiter and see its moons with your own eyes. You can aim it at the moon and discover all those craters that you can't see with your naked eyes. Or you can point it at the Pleiades and count 50 stars in the cluster instead of 7. Like Charles Messier and William Herschel, you can search the skies for nebulae and star clusters. Later on, like Edwin Hubble or Edward Emerson Barnard, you might begin to take your own photographs of the heavens. Or try your hand at discovering comets, asteroids, or supernovae, using the same method employed by Clyde Tombaugh to discover Pluto.
In 1980, I bought a telescope and started my own astronomical journey. I didn't have the benefit of the internet, or even a mentor, so I learned about the night sky through books and magazines. It took many months for me to get to know the constellations and brightest stars that were mapped out by Johann Bayer in 1603, based on the observations of Tycho Brahe. I bought a copy of Wil Tirion's Sky Atlas 2000.0 and started to "discover" some of Charles Messier's and William Herschel's star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies. And it took probably 6 months for me to have that Galileo moment, when I pointed my telescope at a bright star and looked into the eyepiece to "discover" the disc of Jupiter with its two equatorial bands, and the accompaniment of four tiny moons.
Within a year, I bought an SLR film camera and took my first picture of the Orion Nebula. That was my Henry Draper moment! By this time, I had upgraded to an 8-inch Newtonian reflector, and I bought some mounting rings to attach my first telescope, a 60 mm refractor, and used it as a guide scope for the 8-inch. Those first awful pictures I took of the Orion Nebula were still amazing to me! I had done it! The stars in my pictures were more square than round, and not very well focused. But for the first time using my own telescope, I saw the great nebula in color (red, purple, and white), rather than its gray appearance in the eyepiece. Charles Messier and William Herschel never saw M 42 in color in their lifetimes!
By 1985, I was competent enough in my astrophotography to be the first person in my small town to "recover" Halley's Comet. That was when I had my Johann Georg Palitzch experience. Using an ephemeris from Astronomy magazine, I plotted the predicted path of Halley's Comet in my Sky Atlas 2000.0 and planned my shoot for when Halley passed through the stars of Orion's upraised club. I set up my telescope on two nights in October and got pictures of Halley's tiny, fuzzy nucleus. It moved slightly from one shoot to the next, which confirmed my recovery of the comet in only its 3rd apparition since Palitzch detected it on Christmas day in 1758. Of course, professional astronomers, using a newly implemented CCD camera on the Palomar 200-inch telescope, were the first to officially recover the 3rd apparition of Halley's Comet, in 1982.
In 1996 and 1997, I got to see and photograph the great comets Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp. And then in 2006, I saw and photographed my first Mercury transit of the sun. Like Pierre Gassendi, using the predictions by Johannes Kepler, I watched the tiny black disk of Mercury cross the sun. In 2012, I took pictures of my one and only Venus transit, following in the footsteps of Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree.
As a backyard astronomer, these were all very fun and meaningful repeats of historical observations by famous professional astronomers, but none of them compares to my first supernova discovery in February of 2018. That was my Earnst Hartwig experience. During his career, Hartwig discovered some NGC objects, as well as a few comets, and he observed a transit of Venus, but most importantly, it was Hartwig who discovered the very first supernova, SN1885A, in the Andromeda Galaxy.
It is remarkably difficult to discover a supernova by trying to do it! You hear stories now and then about some amateur astronomer buying a new camera and "testing it out" on a nice, photogenic galaxy, like M 101 or M 51, and they chanced upon a supernova! They make it sound easy. As if there are so many supernovae going off that you can just point your telescope at any galaxy on any given night and you'll find one.
Not so! Those guys were as lucky as lottery winners to discover a supernova while just trying out a new camera. Except they didn't get any money for it!
But that ain't me. I ain't no fortunate one, as the CCR song goes. When I began my methodical search for supernovae, shooting 400+ galaxies each month, I found no supernovae! It took me nearly two years, over 500 nights of imaging, and more than 13,000 galaxy comparisons to find my first supernova! That's how difficult it is for one guy with one telescope who can shoot only 50 galaxies, at most, per night.
Before I joined the hunt for supernovae, I heard stories from other supernova hunters who said they were often fooled by asteroids. That sounded plausible, since there more than a million asteroids in the Main Belt. Seems like if you're shooting galaxies along the ecliptic, you'd have a fairly good chance of having an asteroid pass between earth and your target galaxy. But in practice, I found it to be even more rare to come across an asteroid crossing one of my target galaxies than it was to find a supernova!
And just last night, after 8 years of supernova searching, I finally "discovered" my first comet. It makes perfect sense. There are far more known asteroids than there are known comets. It stands to reason that I'd find a photo-bombing asteroid before I'd find a photo-bombing comet, while shooting my target galaxies in search of supernovae.
If you're reading between the lines here, hopefully you're getting another message, and that is astronomy requires a lot of patience. Seeing all 8 of the major planets may require 6 months to accomplish. It may take several years to see the 10 brightest asteroids. It also may take several years to witness your first total lunar eclipse. Mercury transits occur about every 7 years. But it might be 20 years before you'll see a great comet like Hale-Bopp. And unless you can afford to hop on an airplane or cruise ship and travel to exotic places like Easter Island, you may wait 50 years before you can see your first total solar eclipse. The killer of them all, though, is a Venus transit. It can require more than a lifetime to see one. The next Venus transit won't be until 2117!
Backyard astronomy is fun, and it can be very rewarding. That is, if you don't mind waiting for years to see something happen!
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