Comet ISON (not the Terrible)

Is It Aiming for US?

Take a look at this animation (provided by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Science Visualization lab).  It shows the path of the incoming comet around the Sun, beginning right about now and continuing into next year. As you watch, you’ll see that it is right on path to go around the Sun and that it really doesn’t get very close to Earth. It’ll be close enough that we’ll see it as a nice elongated path of light in the sky just before and right after it goes around the Sun at perihelion. Comet ISON will come closest to Earth in January 2014, but as you can see from the video, it will be well above the plane of the planets, and thus proves no danger to our planet. Or us. There’s not much it can do (being a little chunk of ice and rock) at a distance of some 63 MILLION kilometers.

The reason I’m sharing this with you is there’s a good chance you’ll be able to see this comet in late November and then definitely again starting in January. Its plasma and dust tails are forming nicely, so now we just have to wait to see how it survives its close approach to the Sun. Some scientists suspect it could be pulled apart as it rounds the Sun. That’s entirely possible since comets are really just dirty iceballs and strong gravitation and heat are their worst enemies. Heat, as should be obvious, will melt the ices on the comet, which can also destabilize the nucleus, making it more susceptible to breaking up under the influence of the Sun’s strong gravity.

The other reason I’m sharing this is because there are still people out there who are so desperate for some kind of catastrophe (No, in this case I’m not talking about certain right-wing politicians) that they’ve made up some incredible and frankly pretty crazy stories about what they think this comet REALLY is. None of it is, of course, scientific or based on actual facts. However, the Comet ISON nutters (or, as one of my British friends on Facebook calls them: Numpties) have hysteria on their side, pseudoscience, and a lot of screeching points—er, I mean talking points—to explain how there is a spacecraft hidden behind the planet, how it’s going to hit our planet, or that it’s going to cause earthquakes, floods, plagues, etc. You name it, these pseudoscientists will traffic in any kind of information that makes no sense and invoke a comet as the cause.  I think they’re really hung up on this whole idea of a comet with its own spacecraft. And hey, who wouldn’t like one of those to take long drives in?  Alas for the numpties, It turns out those spacecraft turned out to be entirely explainable lens effects in the camera used to take the images. These guys know that, now, but they still seize on those spots in the image as proof!  proof! I tell you!  that there’s something ooky and weird about Comet ISON. I don’t know about you, but I think the ooky and weird is definitely in high supply here on Earth, not on ISON.

Now think about this. Isn’t this whole pseudo-science circus about Comet ISON giving you a strong sense of deja vu? Every time a comet comes around, the same nutjobs get out there and start nattering away about how it’s going to kill us, pepper the planet with deadly gas “particles”, set off volcanoes, hit the planet, take off with the women and babies, and who knows what else excites their feverish imaginations. And yet, we’ve had dozens and even hundreds of comets go by and there’s been no increase in the nearly 3,000 quakes the Earth has every day. Volcanos erupt whenever and wherever they please, and no tiny little ice hunk is going to tell THEM what to do. And, the wimmenfolk are still here (some of us are busy writing about real science, not nutjobbery).  In short, despite the fact that all these comets have been by, NOT ONE of these nutjob predictions has ever come true. Ever.

So, next time you read or hear nonsense about how the comet is gonna “git us”, take it for what it’s worth (nothing).  And, get out there and observe Comet ISON, once it’s bright enough to see. Comets are cool to watch. Check out the observing pages on Sky&Telescope and Astronomy magazines for the latest info on where and when to look.

Want to see another version of that orbit video that you can use to help you understand how Comet ISONs path goes?  Glad to oblige. It’s right here. Its viewpoint is as if you were in a T-38 chase plane riding a few tens of thousands of kilometers alongside the comet.