NEOWISE (comet)

In the UK and Europe, you can see it right now, if you haven’t already and the skies are clear.

Look to the northeast and up. The Big Dipper ought to be pretty distinctive, especially given as it’s more of less the right way up.

There is a “handle” to the left, and the four stars of the “pan” to the right.

Find the upper left star of the pan, and note how far it is to the lower left star. Keep on going that distance further, NEOWISE is about there (tonight). It’ll be a fair bit further left (under the handle) tomorrow.

I took some photos on Friday night, and you can see it’s brighter then it is now and it’s quite far away from the Dipper, unlike now.

https://heyrick.eu/blog/index.php?diary=20200719

If you’ve not seen it, go now. It’s getting progressively dimmer and won’t be back for about 6,800 years.

I saw it on Friday at 23:00. The light pollution is pretty bad where I live, so it was a binoculars-only job. Fortunately I knew where to look :-)

I’ll give it another go tonight but I’m expecting it to have dimmed noticeably in those 2 days.

EDIT: Yup, as I feared it’s now getting rather difficult to see. Even with binoculars I could only just make out the tail.

BTW, your position was slightly off. I had to sight from the top left star to the bottom right star and keep going. But that’s just tonight’s position: as you say it’ll keep moving to the left.

Neowise, isn’t that a new ARMv8 core?

Sorry no, that’s Neoverse.