Observing Comet Lulin

Tomorrow Comet Lulin makes its closest approach to Earth and I have my alarm set for 5 tomorrow morning to try and get a glimpse of it. If you want to find where to look to find the comet then I can highly recommend downloading Stellarium, the best desktop skymap program I've found, by far. From this page, you can find the instructions on how to add Comet Lulin to the encyclopedia of objects in Stellarium. It's then very easy to find exactly where to locate it after you've input a few bits of data about your location.

Comet Lulin from the Nasa website:

Anyway, I'll be looking to get some photos tomorrow early morning and will post anything that is worth looking at. I stretched my camera and lens to their maxima last week by getting a photo of Venus in its half lit crescent state. While it's certainly not the greatest venus shot ever, it is nice to see what can be done without a telescope.

Organic molecules detected on extra solar planet

This is another step forward in the detection of life on other planets (something which I wrote in detail about here). However, the news is that a planet which is too hot to support life has methane in its atmosphere. I presume that this has been found by looking at the absorption lines as the light from the star travels through the atmosphere of the planet. NASA will be holding a press conference on Wednesday to talk about these results. Note that the exciting point is that we now have the technology to do this, not particularly that this finding is in itself that surprising.

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