Watch Comet Siding Spring's Mars Fly-By, Live

From the L.A. Times, and with enough time to tune in, comes this tip: Comet Siding Spring's closest approach to the red planet will occur at 11:27 a.m. [Pacific Time] on Sunday. At its closest approach, the comet will come within 87,000 miles of Mars. That's 10 times closer than any comet on record has ever come to Earth. Sadly, this historic flyby is not visible to the naked eye. People who live in the Southern Hemisphere have a shot at seeing the comet if they have access to a good telescope six inches or wider. However, most of us in the Northern Hemisphere will not be able to see the comet at all, experts say, no matter how big a telescope we've got. Here to save the cometary day is astronomy website Slooh.com. Beginning at 11:15 a.m PDT on Sunday, it will host a live broadcast of the comet's closest approach to Mars, as seen by the website's telescopes in South Africa and in the Canary Islands. Later in the day, beginning at 5:30 p.m. PDT, Slooh will broadcast another view of the comet from a telescope in Chile.

Hands up everyone who's visited Siding Springs?

[kale77in]

In the moderately glorious Warrumbungles.... http://warrumbungleregion.com.... [warrumbung...ion.com.au]

Re: Hands up everyone who's visited Siding Springs

[Namarrgon]

Yep, and followed the "World's (second) Largest Scale Model of the Solar System" [solarsystemdrive.com] (1:38,000,000) as we drove in.

Re:

[_merlin]

Yeah, I've been there. Worth it for the bushwalking and rock climbing as well as the observatory.

16 minutes and counting

[Dereck1701]

I've got it loaded, but not expecting much of anything interesting in a "live" feed. Any earth based telescopes aren't going to have the resolution to see anything interesting and any Mars based assets are going to take a few days to send any decent resolution photos.

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[Teresita]

All the Mars based assets are putting in the Nikes, drinking the grape Kool Aid, and preparing to shed their containers and join the mothership tracking behind the comet.

So why not watch it *FROM* mars?

[mark-t]

We have satellites and landers there, is it impossible for any of them to point a camera at it?

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[photonic]

NASA obviously thought about this possibility, so yes, the event will be observed [spaceflightnow.com] by at least 3 satellites orbiting currently around Mars, 2 rovers on Mars, the Hubble telescope and probably plenty of earth-based telescopes.

Crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Shite.... all I get is loading circle 0 for ages then 'there is an error'. 1998 realplayer crap

Are they streaming

[bobstreo]

From a potato? I can't get the feed to stay running for more than a few seconds....

Re:

[BarbaraHudson]

Don't complain. In this case, there really IS nothing to see here.

Geoff Fox is the man

[WoodburyMan]

Geoff Fox has been narrating many of the live events of Slooh for the last year or so. He's a great guy and very interested in Science, Technology and getting young minds excited in the subject. Geoff - move back to Connecticut! We miss you! With the loss of Mel Goldstein Connecticut no longer has any professional meteorologists or any TV personalities that are really interested in the field and in science overall. All we've had since is the stations hiring a series of attractive woman (not that I'm compla

Re:

[Jane Q. Public]

Well, I only have one issue with TFA and it's nitpicking a bit, but true nevertheless. It's this sentence:

That's 10 times closer than any comet on record has ever come to Earth.

No, it's not. We have on record (relatively small) comets actually striking Earth, which is about as close as it gets.

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[Jane Q. Public]

Oops. I'll correct myself. Those weren't comets, just meteorites.

Brain fart, as the saying goes.

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[tqk]

Now I have to correct myself. Something I read yesterday said, "... has ever come to a planet", not specifying Earth.

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[tqk]

s/Shumaker/Shoemaker/

Astronomical events use UNIVERSAL TIME

[ihtoit]

fucking Pacific Time, the fuck!? Idiot.

Re:

[tqk]

(0) AbsenseOfMalice /home/keeling_ date
Sun Oct 19 18:04:08 PDT 2014
(0) AbsenseOfMalice /home/keeling_ date -u
Mon Oct 20 01:04:12 UTC 2014

Twit. You can't do subtraction?

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[ihtoit]

might as well post it in Jovian Decimal Time, then - and don't forget the fucking conversion key for that as well!

Re:

[tqk]

might as well post it in Jovian Decimal Time, then ...

How about we define the Great Red Spot to be Jovian "Greenwich." Correct if I'm wrong, but last I heard all of Earth would fit into the GRS. Oooh, complication. So much for granularity. Not to mention, the existence of Jovians is yet to be proved, so wtf would anyone want Jovian time zones?

[Good book: "Galileo's Dream" actually touches on this (tangentially).]

I have a really big telescope!

[cyn1c77]

However, most of us in the Northern Hemisphere will not be able to see the comet at all, experts say, no matter how big a telescope we've got.

What if my telescope is both bigger and more curved than most?

Will I then be able to see the comet around Mars?