[Bluearrowll]

What's in the sky tonight?
November 30, 2013

-A bright CME (coronal mass ejection) blasted away from the farside of the sun during the early hours of Nov. 30th. Although the cloud appears to overrun the comet in movies from SOHO (watch), in fact it probably missed or delivered no more than a glancing blow. That's too bad, because a CME impact could reveal the true nature of Comet ISON's mysterious undead core.

-Comet ISON continues to do the exact opposite of what scientists have forecasted it to do. At 19:54 UT Filip Fratev (Bulgarian Acadamy of Sciences) wrote, "ISON [has] started to fade.... [In] the last four hours it faded by more than 2 magnitudes and obviously is less bright... I estimated the comet to be between 2.6 and 3.1 magnitude now."

Four hours later Karl Battams of the Comet ISON Observing Campaign tweeted, "We can't tell if #ISON is in one piece or many. It's about mag 5 now and fading."

-Which rises first: bright Jupiter in the east-northeast, or bright Rigel in Orion's foot in the east-southeast? Both are up by about 8 p.m. depending on where you live. At the latitudes of the U.S. and southern Canada, Rigel comes first tonight. As far north as Paris (latitude 49°) and points farther north, Jupiter is first.

Astro Picture of the Day:
November 30, 2013

Source:
After failing to appear for Sun staring spacecraft at perihelion, its harrowing closest approach to the Sun, sungrazing Comet ISON was presumed lost. But ISON surprised observers yesterday as material still traveling along the comet's trajectory became visible and even developed an extensive fan-shaped dust tail. Edited and processed to HD format, this video (vimeo, youtube) is composed of frames from the SOHO spacecraft's coronographs. It follows the comet in view of the wide (blue tint) and narrow (red tint) field cameras in the hours both before and after perihelion passage. In both fields, overwhelming sunlight is blocked by a central occulting disk. A white circle indicates the Sun's positon and scale. With questions to be answered and the tantalizing possibility that a small cometary nucleus has survived in whole or part, surprising comet ISON will be rising before dawn in planet Earth's skies in the coming days.