The Snowball Effect

Staten Island Advance - Thursday, November 15, 2007

Sane people duck when a dirty snowball barrels near them. Right?

Not always.

Skygazers are front and center these days watching a fuzzy white object known as the Comet Holmes. It flared into visibility late last month, exploded two weeks ago and has been dazzling ever since -- making now a mind-blowing time for amateur astronomer action.

"A comet is like a dirty snowball," explains Irving Robbins, director of the Astrophysical Observatory at the College of Staten Island.

"We say it exploded because it increased in brightness a million times. It was an extremely dim thing that you could only see in a large telescope and now it appears in binoculars. And if you knew where to look, you can actually see it like a star."

Just how long the bright puffball will glow, no one quite knows. But astronomers are guessing it will hang around for a while.

The Staten Island Chapter of the Amateur Astronomers Association points out the Comet Holmes, a moon at first quarter and everything else in the autumn sky Saturday at dusk in the model airplane field at Great Kills Park.

The club supplies the telescopes. This particular moon is special because of its dual nature, says Robbins.

"You're seeing light and dark. It's a spectacular moon that will knock people's socks off," he says. "With the telescope you're able to zoom. You feel like you're floating over the surface like an astronaut in a space capsule over the moon."

Also visible in the autumn sky are Ring Nebula, glowing shells of stars in old age, Double Cluster of Perseus, newly born stars in clusters -- "they look like jewels in space," says Robbins -- and Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest spiral galaxy.

But next week's show stealer still might be the Comet Holmes. The fuzzy glow lies just inside the constellation Perseus, below the more familiar constellation Cassiopeia and due east of Polaris, the North Star.

"Normally a comet has an icy shell. But something cracked the shell and a whole bunch of stuff exploded and now that stuff that popped out of the comet is bigger than Jupiter," says Ray Shapp of the New Jersey-based Amateur Astronomers Inc. "It's 10 times the size of Earth! It's not like the standard comet that would have a tail."

His group runs their shows out of the Sperry Observatory at Union County College in Cranford, N.J., and meets every Friday at 8:30 p.m. Celestial viewing for the public is always included.

Tomorrow, Dr. Kimberly Weaver of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center gives a talk called "New Eyes on the Universe: Observing Beyond Hubble with the Chandra and Spitzer Space Telescopes." With their signature X-rays and infrared light, these telescopes reveal phenomena previously less visible -- star birth, star death, black holes, cosmic collisions.

Of course those telescopes belong to the pros.

Amateurs who want to see more than the polluted city normally exposes can trek about two hours to Jenny Jump State Forest near Hope, N.J. There, United Astronomy Clubs of New Jersey invites the sky curious to use its 14-inch research grade telescope every Saturday night from April through October from 8 to about 10 p.m.

"Those are good dark skies there," says Shapp. "You can actually see the Milky Way."

By Jodi Lee Reifer
Reprinted here with permission from the