Was that the McNaut comet we saw?

Stan Beer
Monday, 15 January 2007 04:00

Science - Space

Yesterday at sunset, the kids and I went down to the beach armed with a couple of pairs of binoculars to do a little Southern Hemisphere stargazing. In fact, to be more precise, we were there to do some comet spotting.

Just after the sun had set and twilight closed in, we spotted what looked like a planet about 30 degrees above the horizon and roughly 30 degrees to the right of where the sun had gone down.

The object was easily visible to the naked eye – even to my less than perfect vision. There were no other objects visible in the sky at that point and we became excited..

We knew that this was either a planet or a comet because its clarity increased and it appeared more like a three dimensional sphere when we trained our binoculars on it. However, try as we might, we couldn’t make out a tail. Perhaps the sky was too bright to see the tail or perhaps we had the wrong object.

Over the next 30 minutes or so the object moved across the sky in the direction of where the sun had set, tracing an arc from right to left (north to south) and dipping lower on the horizon. It seemed to be moving quite fast relative to us.

Eventually the object was lost behind a bank of clouds perched on the horizon and that was the end of it. So did we see a comet or a planet? Given its proximity and speed of movement, I say comet but I have put in a call to the Astronomical Society of Australia to find out for sure.