The Associated Press | Posted: Saturday, November 10, 2007 11:00 pm
A comet that unexpectedly brightened over the past several weeks and is now visible to the naked eye is attracting professional and amateur interest.
"It's got to be one of the weirdest comets I've ever heard of," said Patrick Wiggins, NASA solar system ambassador to Utah. "In 24 hours, literally a day, it went from very, very faint to very bright, nearly a million-fold."
At first, Comet 17P/Holmes exploded to the size of Jupiter, out solar system's largest planet. Now that cloud of gas and dust is as large as the sun.
Experts are not sure how long the show will last but estimate it could be weeks if not months.
Richard Tenney was raking leaves Tuesday when he first glimpsed a "fuzzy" star from his back yard in Lindon.
He grabbed his binoculars, "and boing, there it was. Wow, that's cool. I wasn't expecting it to be that big," he said. "The diameter of that thing really leapt out."
It's so large that it can take several images through a moderately sized telescope to capture the full effect.
In Salt Lake City, stargazers can grab a close look through a 14-inch-diameter telescope at the University of Utah. Mounted on top of the South Physics Building north of University Circle, the observatory is open to the public free of charge on Wednesday nights.
The comet's show has been going on in some form or another since 1892, when a burst led to its discovery by Edwin Holmes.