A large pillar of gas and dust atop NGC 2264 (the Cone Nebula), imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002. Credit: NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (UCSC/LO), M.Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team, and ESA.

I’ve been in the process of performing some long-overdue upgrades and making improvements to the site. This will continue for the next several days as I keep hammering out my desired visual changes and tidying up several loose ends. In the meantime, should you load the page to discover something looks out of place or stumble across an error message, rest assured it’s temporary and likely means I’m in the control panel doing some modifications.

Back to work I go…

No, not that kind.

The rest of the astronomical world is raving about Comet McNaught (C/2006 P1), but I’ve had to live vicariously through others for this one. A string of cloudy evenings has foiled my observing plans for the last several days, and just as the comet was reaching its visual peak for we Northern hemispherians. By the time my local weather decides to cooperate I’ll have missed my chance to catch one of the brightest comets to appear in some 70 years. Others have been far more fortunate, as demonstrated by this fantastic image gallery over at Spaceweather.com.

All is not lost, though. If you’re in the same boat weather-wise or haven’t had a visual opportunity to track down McNaught, you’ll be able to view it via the SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) for the next couple of days. The comet became visible in the spacecraft’s LASCO C3 field of view early Friday and is currently featured on their web site, where you can view still imagery and video.

In addition to SOHO, NASA’s new STEREO mission was able to capture a few nifty glimpses of McNaught Thursday as the trailing spacecraft’s heliospheric imager was activated for the first time (images here). That had to have been quite a treat for the folks working on the project.

Being able to track the comet online makes for a pretty spiffy surrogate, even though I’d rather be breaking out my binoculars. If you’ve been able to muster observations over the last week, by all means post a comment and share your experience.