Elenin -anyone watching this ?
 

Its a meteor that was discovered just last year and is now in stages to pass between the earth and the sun ,a very close call.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2010_X1
Once your at the wiki page theirs alot links of info to read upon.Some comments from the discoverer of the comet are very interesting ,especially the orbit now and its projected path as it passes by earth ,you can advance the days to see this with the forward and backward bars.

That's the one the nutballs are talking about hitting earth on 11-11-11 according to some Mayan-Toltec-Hopi-Nostradamus-Book of Revelations prophecy or something.

Buy ammo now.

Yeah ,their connecting this one to that planetary Nibiru which hasnt shown up yet and wont since it was made up by some wackadooos to sell doomsday books.No ,this one has everyone at NASA looking at closley being that it came out of nowhere ,a deep cycling comet that we wont see again for a very very long time ,this one is going to be a near enough miss to be historical .I beleive it has a 2.5 to 3 mile width and will be the closest on Oct 17th ,the day before my birthday .I hope our govt has a weapon large enough to take out an object this size ,we wont now until it happens if they do or dont.

Let's see, we orbit 98 M miles from the sun. It's going between us. I'm trying to be concerned, really.

Lets view a little more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=716HUotHLdk&feature=related
The orbit around the sun is questionable ,this is just a model ,the sling that the gravitational models are showing now could change daily as it moves thru our area .Its close enough to pay attention too and keep aware.It was an amatuer star gazer that found the comet last year and its approach is like a bullet heading for a target,then being redirected by gravitational forces ,a real guessing game .

Theirs an actual view you can see from google sky,once your their pull up the constellation LEO ,Youll need to put the infrared on the screen by clicking it in the upper right hand corner,its only visable this way.It rest directly at the lower front leg of Leo.Some scientist are calling this a brown dwarf .Im mostly entertained by these end of the world wackadoos but this is real science at work and is not some hoax on the masses.You can usually tell fact from fiction ,fiction has to be believable.

What "scientists" are calling it a brown dwarf? It's a comet, not an asteroid or stellar object, and a pretty small one at that. A 3 or 4 mile wide snowball. A brown dwarf is a sub-stellar object, not unlike but not quite a star. Very different things.

Indeed. And as there was an asteroid that passed between the earth and moon last year I don't see this as being of particular concern. Hopefully if this really is a comet we might be in for a nice show if we get lucky.

- Peter.

Ok ,its now visable in the eastern sky and if Im viewing this right ,what the heck am I viewing?I took a long look at the object and it sure looks like an asteriod ,a big one.Most visable object in the sky and starts rising out of the eastern sky around 8 pm here in Houston.It took me a while to figure out how to get the object in to view ,I had to move the scope slightly by hand as it was in close range then keep it their when viewing .If Anyones out tonight play devils advocate and tell me Im wrong.

I believe you are looking at Jupiter. Elenin itself is aparently below 9th magnitude and unless you are seeing a faint fuzzy looking diffuse greenish white patch in your scope that's not it.

- Peter.

If you could pjcoll bring your scope out tonignt and take a look ,its clearly not Jupiter .

Elenin is a comet. It's not an asteroid.

I shall do so. What scope are you using, and what eyepiece?

- Peter.

A Galileo scope .
Galileo's Place - CT-1380

Well, I've just been out 21:00 local time and the brightest object in the eastern sky at about 30 degrees above the horizon is Jupiter. No sign of anything else.

- Peter.