Swivelhead Report post Posted February 12, 2015 Not an astronomer by any definition however I enjoy checking out comets, meteor showers, etc. Sky & Telescope website has a map showing the path of the comet by date. Those of you who live in outlying areas with a dark sky can likely see a small tail with decent optics. I've been looking at the comet nightly now that the moon has gone away. Best viewing is about 9:00 pm. Comet is 60 degrees above the horizon in the northwest sky. I'd suggest locating the comet with wide field binoculars. You can switch to higher power binos or a spotter once you've got it located. While observing this comet I've also been testing my various optics on star images. Points of light, especially bright light tend to diffuse. Getting a sharp focus on such objects reveals chromatic aberration (CA). None of my optics are flourite or APO's so CA is apparent in all of them. What I noticed was that with my spotters, there was CA but the "sweet spot" was large (star images while ghosting due to CA were somewhat sharp and not diffused to the edges of the field). Tested three binoculars, 10X50 SLC's, 15X56 SLC's and Zeiss Conquest 15X56. CA was present in all three, all of them diffused star images substantially more than the spotters at the edge of the FOV. What surprised me most was that the Zeiss was corrected for CA and had a larger "sweet spot" than either Swaro SLC. I'm not crazy about the Conquest 15x56 ergonomics but optically they are sound. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Tucson John Report post Posted February 13, 2015 Cool! I'll check it out. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
