Pan-STARRS Pans Out

Comet Pan-STARRS has been tantalizing viewers for weeks now, and we finally got our chance to see it this week. Of course, it clouded up and snowed for the first night, but for the past couple of nights we’ve been able to step out and watch it in the twilight about 40 minutes or so after sunset.  It’s not huge, it’s certainly not Hale-Bopp or Hyakutake, but it’s there and even folks who have never taken a pic of a celestial object before are getting some decent snaps of it. We set up our camera and tripod and took these timelapses of it last night, which was really the first time I could make it out naked-eye.

Comets are pretty cool — in both literal and figurative senses. They are made up of ice (mostly), and as they get close to the Sun they develop a dust tail, as well as (often enough) a plasma tail. The plasma tail is simply a long “tube” of gases that are energized by interactions with the solar wind. That interaction causes the gases to glow and that forms that second tail we often see in comet images. So, they LOOK cool, too!

If you get a chance to step outside over the next week, look west about 40 minutes after sunset and see if you can spot Pan-STARRS.  There are some gorgeous finder charts at Fred Espenak’s Astropixels site: they’ll help you locate the comet. And, don’t forget to bring along binoculars!