{"id":1128,"date":"2007-01-22T13:35:00","date_gmt":"2007-01-22T20:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/?p=1128"},"modified":"2020-08-22T13:36:15","modified_gmt":"2020-08-22T20:36:15","slug":"obligatory-comet-mcnaught","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/2007\/01\/22\/obligatory-comet-mcnaught\/","title":{"rendered":"Obligatory Comet McNaught"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>We&#8217;ve had some stupid weather recently so when the sky cleared up on Saturday I realised at about 4:00pm that this was probably my last chance to see&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Comet_McNaught\">Comet McNaught<\/a>. About 15 minutes before the Sun went behind the mountains, I drove East with binoculars and camera to get a good view of the Western horizon, and sat in the car listening to KNPR. No sign of the comet. I was getting cold and I was just about to give up when I saw it. Much higher in the sky than I expected, and possibly I could have seen it earlier were I looking in the right place. Quite beautiful, but to me it did not seem much brighter than I remember seeing Hale-Bopp. Part of the problem is the Spring Mountains in the West, which threaten to obscure the comet before the sun has truly set. I tried taking a photo but I lacked skills and a tripod, and a more capable zoom lens would have been nice also. Here&#8217;s the best result, tweaked for contrast:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/comet_at_twilight.jpg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>There are&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/spaceweather.com\/comets\/gallery_mcnaught.htm\">much nicer pictures<\/a>&nbsp;out on the web, but this is mine, taken in Las Vegas on 13 January 2007, at about 5:00 pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve had some stupid weather recently so when the sky cleared up on Saturday I realised at about 4:00pm that this was probably my last chance to see&nbsp;Comet McNaught. About 15 minutes before the Sun went behind the mountains, I drove East with binoculars and camera to get a good view of the Western horizon, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diary","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}