Cool night... Literally and figuratively...

Last night we had a mini adventure... We did our usual thing - went and hung out with our friends, had dinner, and played cards. On the way there we had seen a strange "star" that was ridiculously twinkly and kept flashing different colors. I was driving, so J was able to look at it more and he thought that it must be a plane that just looked weird, so we didn't really think anything of it...

On the way home (around midnight) we could still see it - obviously in a different position in the sky because of the time that had passed... So we thought maybe it was a planet or something that was visible... So we decided to grab our nice binoculars when we got home to get a better look. After looking at it for a while that way (it kind of looked like a firework hanging in the sky through the binoculars), J went and got his really nice camera with his strongest lens and got a couple pictures with it on the tripod. We still weren't sure exactly what it was, so I went back inside and grabbed the telescope ($150 telescope that we got a Tuesday Morning for $20. LOVE Tuesday Morning... haha) and set it up. We messed with it for a while to get it set up properly and get it focused...

It was a comet. We could see the comet and the firey tail and everything. It was absolutely gorgeous. From certain angles of it passing across the field of vision, you could actually see every color of the rainbow coming from it. We got it with a fairly low magnification and could keep it in view with minor adjustments for about 10 - 15 seconds... Once we switched to high magnification, it would haul out of the field of vision in at most 4 seconds. That thing was booking. There were also a bunch of meteors in the sky last night too... It was so fascinating that we ended up tracking it for about 2 hours... We figured that since we didn't have any plans today, that it didn't matter how late we stayed up... (I guess not having kids yet is good for something.....) We were finally too cold and too tired to stand in our back yard anymore, so we packed everything back up and went inside...

We tried looking on the internet to see if we could find what comet it was that we were watching... We are not 100% sure, but based on the description of its position in the sky, we think it was the Linear Comet... (Apparently there are about 7 comets visible right now and a lot of meteor activity going on... So cool...)

Tonight on our way home from running errands and stopping at our friends' house for a little while we could see it again... And ANOTHER one... We are hoping to be able to see both of them again tonight... Hopefully MUCH earlier... haha If you are outside tonight, find Orion and look down and to the left... If you see something really bright and ridiculously twinkly... That's the comet we were watching.

Awesome.