That's what I thought, but Sky and Telescope's website says, no, the moon's having moved away from it made it visible to the naked eye again after having disappeared for a bit.

Last Friday I went to a star party with my club and braved the cold air (that ultimately froze the gears on my scope so I left at 10:30pm) to see what was out there, and got a medium field photo (a few degrees) of the comet. I used a 300mm zoom lens on my piggybacked digital rebel XTi. Mirfak (Alpha Persei) is to the left. Note the nucleus and that the comet has a tail. The entire halo filled a good portion of my 1.5 degree FOV eyepiece (Williams Optics "Swan" 2in 72 degree AFOV--the poor man's Nagler--25mm at 48x on the 1200mm focal length Celestron C6-R 6in refractor) so it's about 3/4 of a degree in diameter, bigger than the full moon. In actual size, the tenuous halo is actually bigger than the sun. Too bad it doesn't cross Earth's orbit, or we'd have a pretty nice meteor shower from it.

Todd

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Nice pic

Joe

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Joe Bartoszek