Comet ISON Adventure

Melissa and I got up at 5:30 this morning, donned our warmest clothing, and drove a couple of miles to a spot we had picked out along Highway 22 just south of Huntingdon that offered an unimpeded view to the East. Except for a very light string of clouds right at the eastern horizon, it was clear. The Moon was overhead, along with Jupiter. -0.7 magnitude Mercury was there a few degrees above the horizon. Saturn, at magnitude +0.6 was there just to the lower left of Mercury. Even magnitude 2.75 Alpha Librae joined the party to the lower right of Mercury & Saturn, making a roughly equilateral triangle. The only no-show was the guest of honor, Comet ISON. I had seen it a couple of weeks ago on the morning of the 8th of November. Through the telescope it was an unimpressive fuzzball not visible with naked eye or 7×35 binoculars and barely visible through the 10×60 finder. The last few days have been cloudy and rainy so we hoped to get one last glimpse of the comet before perihelion. It was supposed to be just to the lower right of the Saturn/Mercury/Alpha Librae trio, just above the cloud line, but even scouring the area with binoculars turned up nothing. The sky was rapidly brightening by this point and at last report ISON was only about 4^th magnitude. Comet of the Century? No, not yet anyway. We looked a while longer until it became obvious that if we hadn’t seen it already, we weren’t going to see it. Then we drove home. On the way back, Melissa asked me why I had chosen a hobby that required getting up at 5:30 a.m., standing outside in 20 degree weather peering at the sky only to see nothing… I must admit that the possibility of taking up stamp collecting did briefly flit through my mind. Wait… the adventure? Yes, that was it. The adventure! After all, we were doing something really cool and different, something that hardly anyone else even knew about. And we did get to see a nice grouping of two planets and a star. We got to see Jupiter (and even a Galilean moon or two through binoculars) and the Moon! While I pondered what ISON might be like after perihelion, Melissa, the adventurer, went back to bed.