Comet ISON Perihelion Nov. 27th-30th, 2013

Comet of the Century...No, but exciting nonetheless!

I have just come out of a very exciting 3 days of watching comet ISON making its way through perihelion, that is its closest approach with our sun.  The comet was much hyped over the past year as being a possible naked eye object during the daytime, a "Comet of the Century".  Alas it was not meant to be.

I did pretty much all my comet watching using the LASCO C2 and C3 detectors aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint space observatory by the ESA and NASA.  The image database for all the instruments aboard this spacecraft are publicly accessible here:

http://sohodata.nascom.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/data_query

I found it much faster to get at the image data going through this data query interface.  If you just want to see the latest near-realtime image you can go here:

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/realtime-update.html

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