Quote:
Originally Posted by roKWiz
I was lucky enough to see Halley's Comet in 86.
Back in 73 our house was the first house in Carlingford to have a second story addition which gave us a great views of the night time sky (even in Sydney there wasn't much light pollution then) My brothers were into watching aeroplanes coming into Mascot so much so my father bought us a telescope, we used to death.
So many occasions we watched the stars, the moon and space junk.
There were also occasions we observed strange sightings no one could explain.
Happy Winter Solstice.
|
Happy solstice! It's also a partial eclipse on today's solstice, I think best seen in Asia. Cloudy here today though...
Halley's comet, my parents took us out into the Perth hills to see it when we were kids. We got to see it as it left, so the tail appeared as a kind of whispery, wide mess. If you go back to ancient and historical accounts of comets (apart from them being associated with bad luck, famine, plague etc!) they are anthropomorphised (ie given human traits) - described as 'the hair of a maiden' or as 'giving birth to children' if a comet broke up in view or 'a great serpent' etc etc. Halleys certainly looked like the maiden's hair when I saw its tail.
Halleys is the parent comet to the Orionid meteor shower, which we see in late October.
Every now and then a great comet comes into the solar system. Maybe it gets disturbed out in the Oort cloud, maybe it is just traveling by and gets captured. If you go waaaay back into prehistory something big must have come into the solar system in the last 20,000 years and terrified our ancestors: the descriptions of the great comet Typhon and the carnage it wrought are hidden in ancient legends. If you follow Randall Carlson, he proposes that cometary or meteor impact upon the Laurentide ice sheet/Greenland may have been the energy input that triggered the Younger Dryas (massive extinctions, wiping of North American continent within an afternoon of 100m thick water moving at 160km/h that you can still see the results of today) - and all the climatic chaos, 400ft ocean rises and falls, etc. Randall notes that civilisations tend to get wiped on a regular, repeated basis on the 24,000 Precession cycle. Younger Dryas was dawn of age of Leo, exactly about 12,000 years ago from... now.
The link I posted before, Ben, he thinks our star goes micro-Nova every 12000 years and this explains all the destruction. I don't really have an opinion, but it's all fascinating.
Hope I get to see Halley's again!
blueoval awesome pics!