I was browsing through the many press releases I get each day and found this one to share. Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona will be offering a live feed of the Deep Impact on the internet. Read on for details.
June 30, 2005

KITT PEAK VISITOR CENTER TO PROVIDE LIVE IMAGES OF COMET IMPACT
How can you watch the planned first-of-its-kind collision between a comet and a spacecraft from Earth this weekend, even if your night skies do not allow a direct view?
The Visitor Center at Kitt Peak National Observatory plans to offer a live feed of the encounter between NASA’s Deep Impact mission and Comet Tempel 1 starting this Sunday night (local time), running about an hour before the planned 10:52 p.m. PDT impact though about 45 minutes afterward. The feed will consist of still images of the distant comet, and a frequently updated movie assembled from the individual frames. Each frame will consist of a 30-second exposure taken with an electronic CCD imager attached to the 20-inch Ritchey-Chretien telescope in the Kitt Peak Visitor Center observatory.
The comet feed from Kitt Peak will be available on the Internet here.
“Weather and technical gremlins permitting, we intend to post an image about every 45 seconds, and to update the digital movie every few minutes,” said Douglas Isbell, assistant director for public affairs and educational outreach for the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson, AZ, the parent organization of Kitt Peak National Observatory. “This rate of imagery should match up well with the predicted gradual change in the brightness of the comet’s surrounding cloud of dust and gas.”
The live feed will be generated by synchronized computer teamwork between Kitt Peak Public Outreach Lead Observer Adam Block and NOAO Web Designer Mark Newhouse.
The main Deep Impact spacecraft will witness the effects of the collision between the comet and a copper-laden impactor probe released earlier from the spacecraft from as close as 310 miles, but ground-based telescopes are considerably farther away. “Unfortunately, with the comet being 83 million miles from Earth, its nucleus is essentially a bright single point in the image, so we won’t have the ability to see the fresh crater that Deep Impact is expected to gouge out of the comet.”
As with most major ground-based astronomical observatories, including NOAO’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, all of the major National Science Foundation research telescopes on Kitt Peak are observing comet Tempel 1 for several nights before and after the planned Deep Impact event. By the night of July 8, Kitt Peak National Observatory telescopes will have been used for 43 nights in 2005 in support of scientific analysis of the planned comet impact.
This work is described in a previous NOAO press release.
These research observations will be augmented by a special public program on Kitt Peak for 50 people during the night of the event, which is sold out.
For more information about Deep Impact, visit the mission’s Web sites at: Deep Impact at University of Maryland and NASA’s Deep Impact site.

The passage of Comet Machholz near the Pleiades a couple of weeks ago reminded me of a project I spent a number of years working on in the late 1980s and early 1990s—the International Halley Watch Atlas of Large-Scale Phenomena— a compendium of Comet Halley images. The whole thing began when applied for a job as a research assistant on an IHW team at the university. I spent the next several years measuring and studying many, many images of Comet Halley, teasing out details about its plasma tail structures. Our interest was to chart the changes in the plasma tail as the comet sampled various “regimes” of the solar wind, and use those changes to understand how the solar wind affected the charged particles in the plasma tail. It got to the point that I could look at an image of Comet Halley and tell you exactly when it was taken (date and time) and tell you something about whether or not its plasma tail was about to disconnect or was rebuilding itself after a disconnection event (when the plasma tail would break off and then re-form in response to changes in polarity in the solar wind stream).

So, it was with a great sense of memory and history that I looked at this image (and many others) of Machholz as it passed near the Pleiades star cluster in the January sky. For one thing, it was clear that the comet had just undergone a disconnection event. The new tail was sprouting out from the coma and the remnants of the old tail were streaming out in a clump highlighted against the Pleiades. (The dust tail, by contrast, is the yellowish streak that seems to point roughly downward in this image.)

Even cooler, I ran across this image from Gerald Rhemann, one of Austria’s best-known comet chasers and astrophotographers. I became quite familiar with Gerald’s work (along with his collaborator Michael Jaeger) during my Halley years, and in my subsequent role as coordinator for observations for the Ulysses Comet Watch network in the early 90s. It’s a double blast from the past—comet plasma tails and the fantastic work of a photographer whose work I’ve long admired. The scene is stunning, combining my old research interest with one of my favorite star clusters in the winter sky. Sometimes astronomy doesn’t get any better than this!