Martin Mckenna over on the UKWeatherWorld forum has just posted some information about a new comet which was discovered back in March and is now making its closest approach to the sun, passing perihelion at 0.4 AU on Sunday October 28th. With a predicted magnitude of 5-6 (not taking in account any unexpected outbursts) this comet should be visible in binoculars and small telescopes however the challenge will be observing it as the comet stays very low first in the evening then pre dawn sky near the horizon and stays at a low elongation from the Sun. If possible I’m going to at least observe this comet with binoculars.

There is more information on the Aerith website and you can get the ephemeris data for C/2007 F1 LONEOS from this Cambridge website.

Also tonight, anyone with a telescope and clear skies should get out around midnight and watch Mars which tonight is within a field of view of M1, the Crab Nebula.

On Tuesday evening I went over to the Cromwell Tower Observatory amongst the old University buildings in Old Aberdeen where the Aberdeen Astronomical Society were holding their first meeting of the winter season. After an introduction from the President, Darren Moody, we had an excellent talk from Andrew Longmore of the UK Astronomy Technology Centre entitled: “The Case for Exoplanets: facts, guesses and science fiction about planets around other stars”

The talk was very good, giving a comprehensive overview of the history of exoplanet discovery (the first confirmed exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star was announced in 1995), the methods one can use to detect them, the projects that are being planned for the future and what we might expect to find from their results.

Thanks to knowing people in astronomy and my own reading I was familiar with the first couple of parts of the talk, however, it was the details on some of the forthcoming Exoplanet detection projects that were new and therefore of more interest to me. One of these was SPHERE, an instrument destined for the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (the ESO VLT). This project aims to offer direct detections of planets more massive than Jupiter at various stages of their evolution, in the key separation regime 1 to 100 AU and should therefore increase our knowledge of these massive-Jupiter type planets, allowing us to learn more about their evolution and characteristics.

The other two missions of interest are NASA’s Kepler space telescope, due for launch in 2009, and what is likely to be a joint mission involving NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder and ESA’s Darwin mission.

The Kepler mission is one of the likeliest (with current technologies at least) to detect an Earth-like planet and has the following interesting scientific objectives:

1. Determine how many terrestrial and larger planets there are in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of spectral types of stars
   Determine the range of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets
   Identify additional members of each discovered planetary system using other techniques

The other missions (TPL/Darwin) are looking further into the future and involve space-based interferometers.

With all this exciting work going on in this field it is always worthwhile keeping an eye on the Exoplanet Encyclopaedia which does a great job of keeping track of all the latest discoveries. There are also a few other interesting web resources coming from the various projects, my favourite being the interactive Exoplanet atlas which comes from the Paris Observatory. Using this you can see where all the known Exoplanets are in the sky and then click on them to view these solar systems in a simulation type environment. It’s fascinating, detailed stuff and well worth browsing through to get a sense of what is out there.

I’ve just come across this page of absolutely incredible photos from the latest Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station. I’m not sure how long the page will remain up but check them out if you can – they are beautiful.