Comet C2006 M4 Swan

It's too windy to open my dome, but Swan was quite nice in 7x50 binos. Just fits in the same field with M13, and is sporting several degrees of tail.

-- Jeff.

Just in from a few hours of observing, I tried out a new semi dark site near to home tonight which was good, and to top it off, Swan was spectacular in the 20X80's with a tail filling the field of view completely.

Cloud on the way home from 'work' around 2:40am thwarted my attempts to view it...

Daler Rowney 300gm paper
Uniball Signo Mitsubishi White Pencil
Conte Blanc

Swan in my Soup

I headed up to Virginia Co Cavan in Ireland in the hope of clear skies and wonderful darkness.
C2006 M4 SWAN was going to be a superb binocular object with M13 in Hercules.
Well I had wonderful darkness and a clear sky for about an hour. The Met Office described the country as being bathed in sub tropical moist Atlantic air.
Viewing through this atmosphere was like looking at the M13 flyby through soup. I could not see a tail, SWAN seemed to be brighter than M13.
As you can see by my sketch both objects just clipped inside my binocular view.
I was happy to see and sketch this unique pairing.

Deirdre Kelleghan
Irish Astronomical Society
www.irishastrosoc.org

Managed to get a look through the 8-24 X 50 binos tonight. To be honest, it was my first time to SUCCESSFULLY have a look for it... and it was STILL murky and cloudy - with a half Moon!

I could just nail it by the naked eye. In the FOV, it appeared no more than a fuzzy star. Coma was visible, but no hint of a tail. I may try with the 12" reflector tomorrow night if the sky is clear, so fingers crossed.

Seanie.

Was looking at it last night amid all the mayhem and fireworks. The stellar like diamond that was the nucleus is not so promanent and coma itself is smaller. I still put it to be brighter then m13 but smaller in size.