By jove, I think I've found it!

This afternoon I caught wind of another comet making an appearance in the evening sky.

Sudden Naked-Eye Comet Shocks the Astronomy World
Posted by Roger W. Sinnott, Sky & Telescope Magazine, October 24, 2007

A distant comet that was as faint as magnitude 18 on October 20th has suddenly brightened by a millionfold, altering the naked-eye appearance of the constellation Perseus.

This startling outburst of Comet Holmes (17P) may be even stronger than the one that occurred 115 years ago, in November 1892, when the comet was first spotted by English amateur Edwin Holmes.

According to IAU Circular 8886, issued Wednesday October 24th by the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams in Cambridge, Massachusetts, A. Henriquez Santana at Tenerife, Canary Islands, was the first to notice the outburst shortly after local midnight on the 24th. The comet was then about 8th magnitude, but within minutes Ramon Naves and colleagues in Barcelona, Spain, caught it at magnitude 7.3.

*snip*

When I got home I did a search for it on my Starry Night program to find out exactly where I could find it. It help me find this little guy so easily. Once I got the general location, I looked for it with my binoculars and after getting a good fix on its location, I pulled out my reflector telescope. The kids were so excited. I zoomed into it and all I heard was "it's so small!" (see next picture below).



Well, as a matter of fact, it was pretty small. It looked like nothing more than a little fuzzy white dot. No big long tail and nothing like Hale-Bop was back in the 90's, but it was visible by the naked eye, it was a comet, and the kids can chalk up one more exciting thing about astronomy brought to them by dear old dad ...and that alone is more special than anything else I can think of. :)