Hi evreybody,

"The word on Comet ISON at this moment is not good. Karl Battams at NASA’s Comet ISON Observing Campaign – who has almost singlehandedly informed the world about this comet – just wrote:

Last night [Nov. 27], I was optimistic that comet ISON would continue its dramatic brightening trend, and soar into the negative magnitudes. This morning it is indeed with a heavy heart that I show you the image [above], in which we clearly see that ISON has faded rather dramatically in the past few hours. It is still likely around -1 magnitude, but this number is falling fast.

The question on everyone’s lips is “will it survive perihelion?”, and now I’m reluctantly thinking it seems very unlikely to survive at this point. I do think it will reach perihelion, and reach the NASA SDO field of view, but based on what I see it doing right now, I will be very surprised to see something of any consequence come out the other side.

BUT… at every single opportunity it can find, comet ISON has done completely the opposite of what we expect, and it certainly wouldn’t be out of character for this dynamic object to again do something remarkable.

Today’s is Comet ISON’s perihelion. After traveling a light-year’s distance – over a million years – from the Oort comet cloud surrounding our solar system, Comet ISON will encounter the sun today. It’ll sweep only 730,000 miles (1.1 million km) above the sun’s surface. If it survives this encounter, Comet ISON could go on to become a beautiful comet in Earth’s sky.

Want to watch its moment of truth? Your best bet for the few hours around perihelion may be NASA’s SDO page. Perihelion comes at around 18:44 UTC/ 1:44 p.m. EST on November 28. Look here to translate Universal Time to your time.

Or participate in a Google hangout with experts today. It’ll include live feed from NASA’s SOHO sun-observing satellite and from the Kitt Peak Observatory solar telescope. The hangout will take place at 18:00 – 20:30 UTC(1:00 – 3:30 p.m. EST).

See you and "a tchao"

PGR