By this time yesterday I was absolutely certain ISON was cooked, literally. It was tiny to start with, even by comet nucleus standards, and within a million miles of the sun for hours where insolation would heat any normal material to several thousand degrees by any scale, plenty hot enough to boil most metals. Let alone ices and bits of rock. But right now it appears that something might — and we have to stress might — have survived that will slingshot back into cooler solar climes and be visible in December with a small scope.

One can almost picture the spirit of Engineer Scotty working to pull off the miraculous. Oh, and the UFO-alien conspiracy theorists are being oddly quiet, which is fine. Let’s not disturb them.

 

ISON entering the sun’s outer plasma atmosphere on 27 Nov 2013 as seen by NASA’s SoHo spacecraft.Reports of Comet ISON’s suicide by sun have been premature. The plucky little nucleus, now thought to be less than a mile across, is streaking closer to its perihelion tomorrow at about 1:37 EDT. The next two days are the time of greatest danger for ISON. If it survives there’s a chance residents in the northern hemisphere will have a clear view of the comet in the first half of December, stretching across as much as a degree or two of arc, as it passes above the earth’s orbital plane at warp speed on its way out of the solar system forever: [Read more…]

The latest on ISON: it may be in the process of coming apart. But if it doesn’t, later this week, the Bad Astronomer and his buddies will be busy hosting a video party of ISON’s imminent pass by the fire, or its early death: [Read more…]

Thanks to some generous readers yesterday, this will be the last day before Thanksgiving Week I’ll have to bleg for money. The fact is blogging pays about a tenth what it did before the Great Recession and atheist activism isn’t exactly, as The Jerk would say, a profit deal. I’ll have a snail mail address soon for those of you who don’t use Paypal. For the rest, please send small dollar donations to DarkSydOtheMoon-at/aol-com. No amount is too small or too large. For an update on deep space visitors, go below. [Read more…]

Comet ISON is hanging tough for its close encounter with the sun next month. Speaking of comets, evidence for another possible impact has been detected right on the precipice of a major climate change 55 million years ago. [Read more…]

 

Call it premature disintegration? A cometary astronomer has identified signs in the spectra of Comet ISON that are consistent with a poorly understood process of rapid disintegration. A new webpage has been established here to track this dramatic event should it unfold. We’ll know in the next few weeks: [Read more…]

NASA has announced the prime candidate for an ambitious unmanned mission that will visit a Near Earth Asteroid and return a sample of it to earth. The winner is 101955 Bennu, a member of the Apollo group of asteroids roughly half a klick in diameter: [Read more…]

If you’re as old as I am you have reason to be skeptical about comets. Comet Kohoutek in 1973 and the much anticipated return of Comet Halley in 1986 both failed to live up to their potential. But ISON may yet redeem the genre and prove spectacular: [Read more…]

With the caveat of Kohoutek in mind, Comet ISON is shaping up to be a once in a lifetime event: [Read more…]