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We should do a correction. Simply everything is wrong. The picture doesn’t look like an artist’s impression to me, it looks like an image of another comet; the comet is very very dim (one 2019 obs on COBS ~ mag 17, and perhaps unreliable); the time of best visibility is not 21:15 BST (02:45 BST, 36deg alt due east in astro darkness for me). Where is this information from??????
I’ve just sent this link to the discoverer, Carl Hergenrother, who occasionally e-mails me…….
I hope he doesn’t die laughing!
Martin
That is a spectacular example of crap “journalism”, even for the Daily Mirror. “your best chance of seeing the comet, look just above the eastern horizon at around 21:15 BST”. Hmmm.
Come on, give the author a break. When you have got 2281 articles to write and you have a serious twitter account to maintain you’re bound to get a few things wrong
https://muckrack.com/shivali-best
🙂
The thing is though the content is irrelevant. It is all about clicks and we are playing their game.
Exactly!, whilst I tried to resist I couldn’t help it given the subject…
Without being overly crude, in youthspeak… I LMFAO ; – ))
Arrrgh! I fear I’m at least partly responsible for this. Some of the article looks like a mangled version of what’s on my website. My website says that the comet rises at 21:15 BST. I assume the summer student who wrote this article cut and pasted the rising time as the best time to see the comet.
A couple of weeks ago I changed the algorithm used by my website to decide when to list comet apparitions as news events. This resulted in some very bad predictions, which I commented on in a previous forum post. Martin and Nick convinced me I needed to fix this, but I haven’t had time to get it changed yet.
I really need to get on with it… sigh…
Don’t be too hard on yourself, Dominic. I did in fact do a bit of web searching to see where the Mirror journalist may have got this information. And I had a look at in the sky.org . Your site had nothing about 21:15 being the best time to spot the comet, nor did your site say it was super bright (it wasn’t even in the top three brightest comets) / even in the naked eye range.
I thought I recognised the comet photo in the Mirror article – it is Comet West 1975 VI from 1976 – see the following link
https://enacademic.com/pictures/enwiki/67/C_1975_V1_%28West%29_1976-03-09_6h_UTC.jpg
I was new to astronomy back then but heard about this comet but failed to see it in the pre-dawn sky – I then joined ‘The Astronomer’ to make sure I didn’t miss any other bright comets!
Well, I’m very disappointed. Following the story in the Daily Mirror I had a go at imaging this “huge” comet this morning. Nothing was visible to around 20th magnitude. Heavens Above even has finder charts (going to mag 5). A quick Google for Comet 168P brings up a cornucopia of misleading rubbish. What has the Internet done to our common sense?
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