Re: Comet Hyakutake? YES!!!!

["Richard L. Bowman" <rbowman@Bridgewater.EDU>]

On Fri, 22 Mar 1996 msantos@etse.urv.es wrote (in response to my report of 
seeing the comet this morning):

> I saw it on wednesday, had a magnitude 3, 0,5 degrees diameter and
> a tail about 3 deg. It's changing very rapidly. How is it now?
> Miguel Angel Santos
> Spain
It appeared about as large as the Moon would appear.  Through an 
inexpensive pair of 7X35 binoculars it almost appeared to have two pright 
centers (but maybe that was my retina problem showing up).  So maybe the 
dust tails (as reported on various places on the WWW) are appearing very 
bright.  I did not expect to see the the bright center so well defined 
from the surrounding dimmer coma.  My guess is that the coma close to the 
nucleus is much much denser than that further out.

Richard
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Dr. Richard L. Bowman
Dept. of Physics                         e-mail:  rbowman@bridgewater.edu
Bridgewater College                                  phone:  540-828-5441
Bridgewater, VA  22812                                 FAX:  540-828-5479
  "http://www.bridgewater.edu/departments/physics/physics.html";
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