NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Russell D. Sampson
Date: 2023 Jan 17, 12:36 -0500
There's an insignificant comet that's getting lots of low-grade press coverage. The comet is known for short as "Comet ZTF 2022" for the "Zwicky Transient Facility" (right next to the famous 200-inch telescope on Mount Palomar near San Diego). That's the name of the automated survey telescope that was used to discover it last Spring: ZTF.
But this is the WTF comet. WHY THE F* is it in the news??! How did this get out of hand? This is an unimportant, average comet --a once a year sort of thing-- that will be difficult to see and unimpressive. So WTF?! Is this the first comet in 50,000 years? No. Does it have a 50,000 year orbit? Yes, or longer. It's just an estimate, and that's not unusual in any way. So WTF?! Is it an exotic green color?? No, it has a faint green hue which shows up in photos but is almost completely invisible to the human eye, and it's not all unusual for comets. Will it be easy to see? No, but with some effort, dark skies, good optical aid (decent binoculars), and proper timing (avoid the Full Moon), you'll see a small glowing grey "smudge" in the sky.
Really the only interesting thing about "Comet ZTF 2022" is that in a couple of weeks it will be passing through a large constellation that most people have never heard of: the constellation "Camelopardalis" or the "Giraffe" which has exactly zero bright stars in it (a filler constellation created four centuries ago by Petrus Plancius (flatfoot) and adopted by Jan Hevelius). It will also pass quite close (at Full Moon!) to Capella, the Goat Star, and the Kids. Which begs the question: why does the charioteer carry around pet goats??
Once again, WTF??
Frank Reed
NavList
What is NavList?
NavList is a community devoted to the preservation and practice of celestial navigation and other methods of traditional position-finding. We're a group of navigators, navigation enthusiasts and hobbyists, mathematicians and physicists, and historians interested in all aspects of navigation but primarily those techniques which are non-electronic.
To post a message, if you are already signed up as a NavList member, start a new discussion or reply to any posted message and use your posting code (this is a simple low-security password assigned when you join). You may also join by posting. Your first on-topic messsage automatically makes you a member, and a posting code will be assigned and emailed to you for future posts.
Uniquely, the NavList message boards also permit full interaction entirely by email. You can optionally receive individual posts or daily digests by email, and any member can post messages by email (bypassing the web site) by sending to our posting address which is "NavList@NavList.net". This functionality is similar to a traditional Internet mailing list: post by email, read by email, reply by email. Most members will prefer the web interface here for posting and replying to messages.
NavList is more than an online community... more about that another day.
© Copyright notice: please note that the rights to all messages and posts in this discussion group are held by their respective authors. No messages or text or images extracted from messages may be reproduced without the explicit consent of the message author. Email me, Frank Reed, if you have any questions.
Join / Get NavList ID Code
Retrieve a NavList ID Code
Enter the email address associated with your NavList messages. Your NavList code will be emailed to you immediately.
Email Settings
