Check out this photo taken Sunday (appropriate) at Plaza Blanca in Abiquiu, New Mexico. There has been some discussion about two suns for quite some time now:
Author Archives: marcia
Your Color VIbe for Halloween
Wednesday, October 31: Cloudy Green
There are going to be a number of emotional issues coming your way today. They will arise seemingly out of nowhere. It is a good day for starting out grounded and strong within your core self. You are going to need those reserves to deal with the morning and afternoon oddities. The energies are such that people are frantic, and you can find yourself falling into this if you are not careful. You might even begin to feel that there is some kind of target on your back. This is because, with the day’s energies, things are swirling and people are frazzled and unfocused. It is your job to stay focused in what you are doing and not to allow yourself to call into other people’s stuff. There can be a lot of it coming your way today, so just duck.
Your Weekly Chromoscope
October 27-November 2
The theme this week is Things Are Becoming Clearer. This could be good news or bad news. It will all depend upon how open and receptive you are to the new energies that are coming in faster all the time.
Overall Color for the Week: Red Gold
This is a week of distractions. Things are not going to be what they seem to be. This is a week for patience and understanding. Everyone is being bombarded by a lot of changes in many, many areas. It is important for you to be grounded and steadfast in WHO you are. The changes are happening, and if you had any doubts, then step back from the fray and take a good look at what is going on around you. Some of the shifts have been subtle, but now, from a new perspective you can see how things are no longer what they were. This is a week for being at one with WHO you are. This means that it is a week for doing some internal work. It is a week for setting aside some time for meditation, whatever that means to you, and reflection. It is also well to make a kind record of how you are seeing things. This will be important as the time goes by. It will act both as a reminder and a milepost. It is well to have a whole repertoire of Plan B’s at hand…. Just in case. Things are no longer as they were and people are no longer who they said they were. You will be finding out more and more as the time progresses just who your friends are and who constitutes your true community. Trust your intuition. There can be some tears. There can be some revelations. But most of all, there can be moments in which you are most truly aware of your own power.
On the larger scale there are more and more changes and upsets in the air. Politics in all places is becoming a very nasty game. It is being played, in most cases, in the interests of the politicians, and the people are left hanging. Has it not been this way throughout history? However, you will see that this week there will be movements among the grassroots that will allow the politicians to see that they need to recognize and respect the needs of the people. There is a long-standing divide between the people who feel they are in control and the people who have been controlled. That divide is breaking down. You will see that there will be some interesting movements in the financial areas in which certain groups will be working to establish a new kind of currency. The Earth is shifting more and more. There has been a subtle change of direction of Gaia’s energetics below the surface that has been going on for quite some time now. You will see the effects of this in the earth patterns this week. Expect things to be unpredictable. There is more activity than ever in the skies, and it is becoming more obvious. There is a new wave of help from the Galaxies that is coming in. They will make them selves obvious in very subtle ways. There can be things starting which all will expect to result in some sort of large scale event, and then those things will all fizzle out. There are a lot of anomalies that will be around this week. The energetic grid that has sustained the globe for so long is breaking down. There is a new direction to the energies and the spin is unknown. This will be seen this week in strange occurrences. The Sun is more active and there can be effects on the magnetics. There is a shift of the magnetics going on right now but it is not what you have always expected. This one, because it has a relationship to the higher energetic and dimensional grids, is not part of this 3D continuum. Because of this, there can be odd things happening in all areas, including electricity, electronics, and even the usual cause and effect mechanisms can be affected.
On Being a Spiritual Warrior
Elana Miller, MD
Psychiatrist and writer at Zen Psychiatry
9 Ways to Be a Spiritual Warrior
Posted: 10/27/2013 10:04 am
Only as a [spiritual] warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an endless challenge and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges. The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse. — Don Juan, as quoted by Jack Kornfield in A Path With Heart
I first read these words in medical school, in the middle of a difficult surgical rotation. I felt depressed and beaten down from working 80+ hour weeks and arduous overnight shifts, and demoralized by poor treatment from my superiors (who were undoubtedly demoralized, themselves). I wanted to be a surgeon, but couldn’t imagine the rest of my life looking like this. And then, out of nowhere, my boyfriend broke up with me. It felt like things couldn’t get much worse.
Then, I read these words in Jack Kornfield’s book, A Path With Heart. I mulled over what he said, and turned it over in my mind. I began to consider whether it was possible to see painful experiences as challenges to work through, and not as bad luck to lament. I wondered, could I see the same circumstances through different eyes? Soon after, I decided to abandon a career in surgery for a future in psychiatry (and haven’t looked back since). Here are some ways we can all cultivate our own inner spiritual warrior — the part of us that faces challenge with wisdom, equanimity, and compassion.
1. Turn straw into gold. Our deepest suffering is often our greatest opportunity to learn about ourselves and take action to be better people. Working through suffering is how you learn to be patient, humble, and grateful. And developing strength in the face of painful circumstances teaches you that you don’t need to fear the natural ups and downs of life, and instead can face whatever comes your way with inner calm and peace.
2. Integrate mindfulness into daily life. Being mindful doesn’t mean you need to spend hours a day meditating — you just need to pay attention. We think we don’t have the time, but it doesn’t need to take any extra time. Practice paying attention when you’re engaged in daily activities. When you’re washing the dishes, wash the dishes, and try not to let your mind wander to the past or future. When you’re eating, eat. When you’re walking, walk, and pay attention to the ground under each step.
3. See everyone as your Buddha. Just as difficult circumstances can be opportunities for growth, so can interactions with difficult people. Imagine that any difficult person you encounter is actually the Buddha in disguise, put there to teach you a specific lesson about life or about yourself. What do you think the universe is trying to teach you?
4. Recognize the difference between pain and suffering. In Eastern philosophy, pain and suffering are two very different things. Pain is the inevitable hardships of life, and suffering is the avoidable negative narrative we add on top of that. Losing your job is pain — telling yourself that this means you’re a failure is suffering. Ending a relationship is pain — interpreting this to mean that you’ll never meet anyone again is suffering. You can’t eliminate pain, but you can end suffering.
5. Set a daily intention. In many meditation and yoga classes the teacher will ask the students to set an intention at the beginning of their practice. The same exercise can be useful in your day-to-day life. Try asking yourself every morning, “What emotion or feeling do I want to cultivate today?” Maybe it’s to be patient, nonjudgmental, self-assured, happy, or open-minded. Whatever it is, set an intention to foster this quality throughout your day.
6. Create space for negative emotions. A common reaction to painful emotions like doubt, fear, or anger is to squash them down and pretend they’re not there. You’ll actually find it a lot more tolerable if you create space for them, instead. Imagine whatever painful emotion you’re feeling as a compact ball of energy at your heart. Now expand that ball of energy to take up the whole room, the whole street, the whole planet, the whole universe. As it diffuses outward, the strength of the emotion wanes. As you pay attention to it, it loses power.
7. Cultivate wise thoughts. So little of how we see the world is based on fact and reality, and so much is based on subjective perceptions and interpretations. This is why unwise thoughts can be so destructive and wise thoughts can be so empowering. Choose to cultivate wise thoughts. We can’t always choose how we feel, but we can choose what thoughts patterns and narratives we want to nurture.
8. Do something you’re afraid of every day. In order to be able to do anything really amazing or courageous, we need to be able to act even when we’re afraid. This is learned skill. The more you do it, the better you get at it. Practicing in small ways can help you build the momentum for something bigger. Maybe it’s asking that cute girl out at the grocery store, or negotiating a price when you don’t feel comfortable haggling, or speaking up at work when normally you keep quiet. Whatever you’re afraid of, practice doing it.
9. Act out of love, not fear. Many people think the opposite of love is hate, but I would argue it’s fear. While fear is a closing and contraction of the heart, love is a warmness and openness to yourself, the people around you, and whatever circumstance comes your way. If you’re ever confused and unsure how to act, ask yourself one question: Does the action you’re considering spring from love or from fear? Always choose love.
from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elana-miller-md/spiritual-development_b_4152726.html?utm_hp_ref=gps-for-the-soul&ir=GPS%20for%20the%20Soul
Healthy Emotions to Foster
Jim Sniechowski, PhD
Co-creator, The Fear of Being Fabulous (TM)
The 5 Key Emotions of Success
Posted: 10/28/2013 3:51 p,
How do you know when you are successful? What clues do you need to demonstrate that you know you’ve made it whether you’ve reached a life goal or just completed an important project? With regard to how you feel, should there be a difference in feeling between the sizes of your achievements — small, medium, large, colossal?
No doubt there will be an intensity difference. You can’t expect the same level of intensity across an entire range of possible successes. But the intensity of your experience should not alter the emotional experience itself. For example, if you are pleased with something you’ve done you can be exhilarated or quietly thoughtful, but the fact that you are pleased does not change. Only the expression and emotional intensity of your being pleased changes.
With that, here are five key emotions that will let you know you’ve succeeded — not that you’re on your way, but that you have actually reached the success you intended.
Ease/Comfort With What You Are Doing
Once you’ve succeeded at something you know what you’re doing. What was once a struggle in the learning process becomes a graceful implementation. Why graceful? Because you’ve become confident in your ability to deal with what life brings you. You’ve done it and furthermore you know you can continue, and that’s what brings the comfort; that comfort is the source of your ease.
Patience With Yourself and Others
Patience is tied to your confidence because in knowing that you can handle what life brings you, you can deal with whatever comes your way. No need to panic. You know you will take the time to see things through because things take time. Success is about quietly and steadily persevering or being diligent, especially in the details.
Trust of Yourself and Those With Whom You Work
Trust is an issue of reliance. You can count on yourself to come through. You can rely on your own integrity, your strength, your ability and the ability of those you work with. You can be sure, within your experience, that what’s needed to be taken care of will be. So you can relax and be confident of your own expectations, of your vision and the choices you make, and you can know that the world will support you and your intentions.
Compassion With Yourself and Others
There’s no need to measure yourself against others, or against any extremes. The locus of control of your life is solidly centered within you. There’s no longer any need to seek perfection. You can assess all of the factors that make up any moment, and take the time to think critically and evaluate as deeply as you need, because you know what you’re doing. Your gut and your heart can lead the way.
Satisfaction That Comes With Success
Very deeply within you, you know you belong where you are. You live with a confident acceptance of your talents and your limitations without any need to grasp or seize to prove to yourself that whatever skills and talents you possess won’t fade away. In other words, your success is not just a one-off. You can let go of unwarranted self-judgment that you’ve wasted time. You haven’t. All those moments, even those in which you were doing nothing, have come together to make you who you are. And it is you, all of you, the whole of you that is now successful.
These emotions are part of every success you’ve achieved, even the small successes on the way to a large accomplishment. Watch for them. They are the brick and mortar of enjoying who you are and who you are becoming.
from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-sniechowski-phd/the-5-key-emotions-of-success_b_4103830.html?utm_hp_ref=healthy-living
Info on Chemotherapy Safety
What The Cancer Industry Does Not Want You To Know About Chemotherapy and Radiation
30th October 2013
Guest Writer for Wake Up World
They tell us chemotherapy saves lives, boosts long-term survival rates and does not damage healthy cells. All these statements by the cancer industry are false. Poison kills indiscriminately — always has and always will. While damaging healthy cells, chemotherapy also triggers them to secrete a protein that sustains tumour growth and resistance to further treatment. That’s right…chemotherapy will actually boost cancer growth and cancer treatment is the leading cause of secondary cancers.
Vaccines, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics and therapies, dentistry, psychiatry and practically all medical research is an industry and driver of corporate profits. The cancer industry is particularly ironic because the products that cause many cancers are made by divisions of the same multi-national corporations whose subsidiaries make the scanners and equipment that is used to diagnose cancers, the drugs used in chemotherapy and those given to prevent the cancer returning.
In what reality do we live in when cut, poison and burn are the only ways acceptable to treat cancer?
The cancer industry destroys or marginalizes safe and effective cures while promoting their patented, expensive, and toxic remedies that do more harm than good.
No chemotherapy drug has ever actually cured or resolved the underlying causes of cancer. Even what mainstream medicine considers “successful” chemotherapy treatments are only managing symptoms, usually at the cost of interfering with other precious physiological functions in patients that will cause side effects down the road. There is no such thing as a drug without a side effect.
Chemotherapy and Radiation May Kill Cancer, But They Also Kill You
Chemotherapy has a number of post-treatment adverse effects. Most chemotherapeutic agents do enter the brain and they can directly and indirectly produce a number of acute and delayed changes to the central nervous system. These effects can last for years, then dissipate, or, when they occur in young children, can ripple into adulthood.
The long-term survival rates of chemotherapy patients are grossly exaggerated because most of these patients end up dying of diseases unrelated to the original cancer itself, but instead related to the treatment.
Chemotherapy drugs (especially alkylating agents) are known to cause other cancers including leukemia many of these drugs fall into this class. Alkylating agents directly damage DNA of all cells. These agents are not phase-specific; in other words, they work in all phases of the cell cycle. Because these drugs damage DNA, they can cause long-term damage to the bone marrow and consequently affect long-term immunity. With these drugs, the risk for a second cancer develops slowly over time but their diagnosis is inevitable. Studies have shown that the risk begins to rise about two years after treatment, is highest about five to 10 years after treatment. It’s the reason most chemotherapy patients die 10-15 years after treatment.
Radiation therapy can also increase the risk of developing cancer in most people. The types of cancers linked to radiation therapy are vast, but primarily consist of leukemia and sarcomas. These cases typically develop a few years after radiation exposure with the peak of risk being about five to nine years after exposure. Again, most patients that pursue radiation therapy develop secondary cancers related to treatment and not as a consequence of the original cancer. Radiation-induced cancers have exploded in the past two decades ever since radiation has proliferated as a treatment, usually secondary to chemotherapy.
Some other cancer risks are tied to radiation therapy, as well. Solid tumors can develop at or near the site of the radiation exposure even 10 or more years after the radiation therapy. These risks seem to be greatest in certain areas of the body, such as the breast and the thyroid. In some of these cases, your age at the time of radiation treatment plays a role. For example, younger breast cancer patients are more likely to develop a second cancer from radiation therapy than older breast cancer patients.
Doctors Speak Out About The Cancer Industry
Dr. Robert Atkins, MD, of Atkins Diet fame once announced there are several cures for cancer, but there’s no money in them. They’re natural, effective, and inexpensive, no expensive drugs are involved but they require quite a lot of self-discipline from patients. It costs millions to fund research and clinical trials needed to produce a new cancer drug that can be patented and sold. Often these drugs create more illness. It has been said that the key to success in the health business is to pull off the trick of making people patients for life. Consider how many people who registered a couple of abnormal blood pressure readings have been kept on medication until the medication killed them, when a quick fix course of drugs supported by major changes of diet and lifestyle would have returned their physical condition to an unmedicated healthy state.
According to Dr. John Diamond, M.D., “A study of over 10,000 patients shows clearly that chemo’s supposedly strong track record with Hodgkin’s disease (lymphoma) is actually a lie. Patients who underwent chemo were 14 times more likely to develop leukemia and 6 times more likely to develop cancers of the bones, joints, and soft tissues than those patients who did not undergo chemotherapy.”
Dr. Glenn Warner, who died in 2000, was one of the most highly qualified cancer specialists in the United States. He used alternative treatments on his cancer patients with great success. On the treatment of cancer in this country he said: “We have a multi-billion dollar industry that is killing people, right and left, just for financial gain. Their idea of research is to see whether two doses of this poison is better than three doses of that poison.”
Dr. Alan C. Nixon, past president of the American Chemical Society writes, “As a chemist trained to interpret data, it is incomprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that chemotherapy does much, much more harm than good.” And according to Dr. Charles Mathe, French cancer specialist, “…if I contracted cancer, I would never go to a standard cancer treatment centre. Only cancer victims who live far from such centres have a chance.”
Dr. Allen Levin stated: “Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon, or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade, yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumors.” In his book, The Topic of Cancer: When the Killing Has to Stop, Dick Richards cites a number of autopsy studies which have shown that cancer patients actually died from conventional treatments before the tumor had a chance to kill them.
How Chemotherapy Actually Boosts Cancer Growth
Researchers tested the effects of a type of chemotherapy on tissue collected from men with prostate cancer, and found “evidence of DNA damage” in healthy cells after treatment, the scientists wrote in Nature Medicine.
Chemotherapy works by inhibiting reproduction of fast-dividing cells such as those found in tumours.
The scientists found that healthy cells damaged by chemotherapy secreted more of a protein called WNT16B which boosts cancer cell survival.
“The increase in WNT16B was completely unexpected,” study co-author Peter Nelson of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle told AFP.
The protein was taken up by tumour cells neighbouring the damaged cells.
“WNT16B, when secreted, would interact with nearby tumour cells and cause them to grow, invade, and importantly, resist subsequent therapy,” said Nelson.
In cancer treatment, tumours often respond well initially, followed by rapid regrowth and then resistance to further chemotherapy.
Rates of tumour cell reproduction have been shown to accelerate between treatments.
“Our results indicate that damage responses in benign cells… may directly contribute to enhanced tumour growth kinetics,” wrote the team.
The researchers said they confirmed their findings with breast and ovarian cancer tumours.
Patients with incurable cancers are promised much greater access to the latest drugs which could offer them extra months or years of life, however many doctors have been urged to be more cautious in offering cancer treatment to terminally-ill patients as chemotherapy can often do more harm than good, advice supported by Nelson’s study.
90% of Patients Who Receive Chemotherapy Suffer Fatal Effects
The National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD) found that more than four in ten patients who received chemotherapy towards the end of life suffered potentially fatal effects from the drugs, and treatment was “inappropriate” in nearly a fifth of cases.
Globally, almost 90% of patients who are administered chemotherapy die within 15 years of treatment either from secondary cancers, or a compromised immunity as a direct consequence of the treatment. Chemotherapy and radiation combined are the leading cause of secondary cancer worldwide.
There has been a 68% increase in the use of chemotherapy drugs since 2003 and despite the massive increase in the incidence of cancer since then; the risk factors (according to the cancer industry) for primary and secondary cancers are still related to tobacco, alcohol, occupational exposures and genetic determinants. Cancer treatment or diagnostics is never mentioned as a cause of any primary or secondary cancers.
Cancer is a leading cause of disease worldwide and if recent trends in major cancers are seen globally in the future, the burden of cancer will increase to 22 million new cases each year by 2030. This represents an increase of 75% compared with 2008.
More than half of all cancer patients suffer significant treatment-related toxicity. Treatment can also result in life-threatening infections or patients may simply die of their cancer.
When asked about how to improve a patient’s response and outcome, Nelson replied “alternatively, it may be possible to use smaller, less toxic doses of therapy.”
But small doses of poison are still poison.
The bottom line is that chemotherapy destroys virtually all cells and systems before getting to the actual cancer. This means your central nervous system, organ systems and your immune system (to name just a few) are all compromised even years after the treatment has subsided. Forget about cancer killing you because chemotherapy will do a much better job in the long term.
Chemotherapy causes healthy brain cells to die off long after treatment has ended and may be one of the underlying biological causes of the cognitive side effects — or “chemo brain” — that many cancer patients experience.
Conventional cancer treatment is a massive and expensive fraud–a non-treatment that sickens and kills more people than it ever “cures.” It can never cure anything because it poisons the body which only causes more disease in the future.
The question [of whether or not chemotherapy really extends life, ed.] can probably no longer be answered. In clinical studies the manufacturers always compare their new drugs with older cellular poisons. There are no control groups that are given no treatment at all.
In order to be allowed onto the market, it suffices to achieve a “statistically significant” advantage in one small group of hand- picked test subjects vs. those treated with some already approved cellular poison.
from: http://wakeup-world.com/2013/10/30/what-the-cancer-industry-does-not-want-you-to-know-about-chemotherapy-and-radiation/
Vatican Stores UFO Info
Vatican Hides Alien Information From Public, UFO Sighting News.
In May 2008, Funes gave an interview to the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano newspaper saying that the existence of intelligent extraterrestrials posed no problems to Catholic theology. The conference itself was officially convened by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, chaired by its religious leader Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, and was held on private Vatican grounds from November 6-10. Together with Funes’ 2008 interview and subsequent public comments by him, the conference demonstrates a welcome openness by the Vatican on the possibility and implications of extraterrestrial life. The Vatican’s openness to discussion of extraterrestrial life is no accident. It is part of an openness policy secretly adopted by the United Nations in February 2008. In fact, the Vatican is playing a leading role in preparing the world for extraterrestrial disclosure.
from: http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/2013/10/vatican-hides-alien-information-from.html
Your Color VIbe for Monday, 10/28
Monday, October 28: Red Silk
This is a day when, once again, things will not be as they seem. It is important to see what happens for what it really is,. There are those out there who are attempting to put a rosy glow on things in order to win you over to their side. You always have the choice, but it is important to be informed. Your best bet is to put things off until tomorrow. There is nothing wrong with gathering enough information to be able to see an issue from all sides. Emotionally today, you can find yourself somewhat up and down. Also, there will be little messages coming from your body that you might just want to pay attention to. If you are hungry, eat. If you are tired, sleep. And then your intuition also will be active. It you get the feeling that it is not the best idea to take a certain byway, pay attention. Many things are happening today on many levels. Focus is a good idea.
Observing Comet ISON
Out There
A Novice Observer’s Guide to Comet ISON
By Corey S. Powell | October 25, 2013 2:35 pm
If you enjoy a dramatic spectacle in the sky, you have probably heard about Comet ISON, currently streaking toward the sun. (If you haven’t heard about it, bear with me—I’ll try to make it worth your while.) But the media coverage has been downright confusing. The first reports described it as a “comet of the century,” possibly as bright as the full moon. Then came some whipsaw downbeat news stories suggesting that the comet was fizzling and might have already begun to disintegrate.
Comet ISON as seen by the Hubble telescope on October 9, when it was 177 million miles from Earth. (Credit: NASA/ ESA/Hubble Heritage Team)
No wonder DISCOVER readers have been sending in a steady stream of inquiries: What will Comet ISON really look like? When will it be visible? Where can I see it? Good questions. Time for some answers—and I’ll have a lot more to say about the science of the comet itself in an upcoming blog post.
What it will look like Almost all of the forecasts about Comet ISON contain huge uncertainties. As comet hunter David H. Levy is fond of saying, “Comets are like cats; they have tails and they do precisely what they want.” The Comet ISON Observing Campaign has put together a set of scenarios that explore the staggering range of possibilities.
It now seems almost certain that Comet ISON will fall short of the early, optimistic assessments (truth be told, it was never going to light up the night like the full moon, since peak brightness will happen while it is less than one degree from the sun…in the middle of the day). The dire predictions that the comet has fizzled are simply wrong, however. Recent Hubble images show it beautifully intact.
A recent study by Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute gives additional reason for hope. Comet ISON is oriented such that one side has remained shadowed so far. When the comet whips around the sun on November 28, the comet’s night side will suddenly emerge into daylight and be hit with an intense blast of solar heat. That could potentially lead to a spectacular eruption of gas and dust.
The upshot is that Comet ISON is sure to be a pretty sight through binoculars or a wide-field telescope, and it still has plenty of potential to be an exciting addition to the visible sky after Thanksgiving.
When and where to look I created a quick reference guide about when and where to look for Comet ISON. It appears in my Urban Skygazer column in the November issue of DISCOVER, and you can read it here. A viewing skychart is available from my colleagues at Astronomy magazine.
There are two crucial things to know about looking for Comet ISON.
Projected brightness of Comet ISON, with actual measurements in orange, shows how rapidly it will peak at closest approach to the sun on November 3. (Credit: NASA CIOC/Matthew Knight)
First, it is a peaky comet (full details here if you want to take a deep dive). It will brighten rapidly in the days just before Thanksgiving, so don’t even try looking for it with your naked eyes right now—it’s far too faint. Probably it will become visible from dark skies by mid-November, but may be tricky to see on its way in. The best viewing should come in the couple weeks after November 28, when the comet is heading away from the sun but toward the Earth. Because of the shifting geometry, Comet ISON will probably fade quite a bit more slowly than it brightened. Even so it may be lost to the naked eye well before it makes its closest approach to Earth on Christmas day.
Second, you will need dark skies and an unobstructed horizon to get the best view. At its brightest, Comet ISON will be close to the sun and hence close to the horizon just before sunrise. In the first half of December the comet will get higher in the sky and (depending on how it behaves) may have a ghostly tail stretching up to a quarter the way across the sky. To appreciate its full extent, though, you will need to get far away from urban light pollution. And as you may have already picked up, you need to wake up early in the morning, just as dawn is breaking.
OK, so will it be worth the effort? Nature doesn’t always make things easy or convenient. The payoff is that you will get to see something rare and wonderful: A primeval ball of ices and dust grains, frozen since the time of Earth’s formation 4.5 billion years ago, vaporizing and spreading out into space. It’s also amazing to recall how small the actual comet is. Its tail may stretch millions or even tens of millions of miles across, but the solid body creating that whole spectacle is just a couple miles across!
If you get an exceptionally good look at Comet ISON’s tail you may be able to see that comets actually sprout two kinds of tail–an ion tail (composed of individual, electrically charged gas atoms) and a dust tail (composed of larger particles). Both tails are affected by both the solar wind and by light pressure from the sun, but they react in different ways. The ion tail always points straight away from the sun. The dust tail lags behind a bit as the comet orbits around the sun. The result is that the two tails typically show up separately, often with distinctive structures, shapes, and colors.
So when you view a comet you get to see the invisible interplanetary dynamics of the solar system, as well as a relic from a time when Earth was just a lifeless ball of molten rock. Worth getting up early for, I think.
from: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/outthere/2013/10/25/novice-observers-guide-comet-ison/#.Um1YvSThGlk
Comet Linear X1 Explodes
COMET LINEAR X1: The sun isn’t the only thing exploding. Almost 450 million km from Earth, Comet C/2012 X1 (LINEAR) is having its own outburst. On Oct. 20th, amateur astronomers realized that the comet’s brightness had increased 100-fold and its morphology resembled that of exploding Comet 17P/Holmes in 2007. Follow-up images in recent nights seem to show jet-like structures in Comet LINEAR X1’s expanding atmosphere. Amateur astronomer Nick James of Chelmsford, UK, obtained these data on Oct. 26th:
Another set of images taken by James shows the comet’s atmosphere or “coma” expanding over a period of two days. “The coma’s diameter is increasing at a rate of 30 arcseconds per day,” says James. “At a distance of 2.95 AU this corresponds to 65,000 km/day or a little less than 1 km/s.” He made these observations using an 11-inch Celestron telescope.
Located in the constellation Coma Berenices, Comet LINEAR X1 rises in the east about an hour before the sun. The low altitude of the comet in morning twilight is a challenge, but because the comet is fairly bright, magnitude +8.5, it is still a relatively easy target for backyard telescopes equipped with digital cameras. Monitoring is encouraged! Resources: 3D orbit, ephemeris, sky map.
from: spaceweather.com