![]() Calendar, event finder, logbook, light pollution & night vision.Travel in time from 99,999 BC to 99,999 AD.High-resolution OpenGL planetary maps and star-field graphics.Full-colour 360° Mosaic All-Sky CCD image of the entire night sky.Planets and comets near the Sun are also recorded. Because SOHO is in space, there is no atmosphere to scatter the Sun's rays, so the background stars are visible in C3 down to about 6th magnitude. In each camera, a disk blocks the Sun's direct image. C3 has a field of 32 degrees and C2 6 degrees. Two of its cameras were of particular interest for observing ISON, Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraphs #2 and #3, known as LASCO C2 and C3 for short. These appear on the internet within hours of them being taken: This satellite was placed at Earth's L1 Lagrangian point in 1995 to record solar activity 24/7, and is still functioning well after 18 years, returning images many times every day. SOHO is short for Solar and Heliographic Observatory. The yellow circle in the middle graphic above represents the field of view of the SOHO satellite's LASCO C3 coronagraph.Ī word about SOHO and LASCO. What would this do to a will-o-the-wisp body like a comet?īy this time the comet was too close to the Sun to be observed from Earth, so we turned to solar observatories in space to follow its dive towards the Sun. On that day, the comet was predicted to pass through perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun at an altitude of only 1,165,000 km (724,000 mi) above the Sun's surface. This was the only morning I observed it with my own eyes: īut the really scary thing for everyone was what might happen on November 28, Thanksgiving Day. On the morning of November 14, it suddenly increased several magnitudes in brightness, and we hoped it might be back on track. This was a reasonable prediction based on the orbital elements known at the time, but two events happened along the way.įirst of all, the comet did not brighten as quickly or as much as predicted, so we had to scale back its predicted brightness.
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