On the evening of 17 March I was birding in the Montezuma area. The clearing sky inspired me to stay and look for the comet. I chose Olmstead Road, which is the first right turn off Armitage Road when you go west from where NYS-89 turns. Olmstead is on the crest of a drumlin with no trees, so there's an unobstructed view over thinly populated lands to a distant western horizon. plus there's a good distance before the first house on the road. I never saw the comet naked-eye, but did find it in binoculars slightly north of west at 8:17pm and watched it until 8:46 when it became too dim in the low sky. It was a fuzzy dot with a triangle of tail projecting vertically, which made it pretty satisfying compared to Halley, which, 'though visible naked-eye, was only a fuzzy dot.While awaiting the comet to appear I saw many silhouetted flocks of geese commuting south toward the lakes.--Dave NutterOn Mar 20, 2013, at 08:56 PM, Alicia Plotkin t...@zoom-dsl.com wrote:Hi, In case I'm not the only one who has searched fruitlessly for Comet PanSTARRS, it is visible right now, significantly north of west, and higher in the sky than I expected - maybe ~6 full moon diameters (?) above the horizon - I'm even worse at astronomical descriptions than bird descriptions! But it is the lowest object I can see in the western sky with the naked eye: a very faint dot from my backyard, but thru 10 power binoculars, it is far more impressive with a fairly wide filmy tail pointing straight up. And to make this marginally bird relevant, for the first time in several nights there is not a mass of snow geese barking in the middle of Seneca Lake tonight. They don't make as much noise as when they fly, but there is a constant murmuring all night long many nights this time of year. Alicia in Ovid -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html'http://www.mail-archive.com/cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
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