Sky and Telescope - November 2015 - 76

Focal Point

Howard J. Brewington

The Last Visual Comet Hunters

The era that Charles Messier began
250 years ago comes to an end.
CASEY REED

My involvement in amateur astronomy ran hot and cold until 1985, when
Halley's Comet returned. I loved the
comet's unpredictability as I followed it
each clear night for months before and
after its perihelion in February 1986.
Halley set my future direction in amateur
astronomy, inspiring me to become a
comet hunter in 1988. I had no idea at the
time that I'd be in the last generation of
visual comet hunters.
Charles Messier invented the discipline of comet hunting after witnessing
Halley's ﬁrst predicted return in 1758.
The successful forecast made Halley the
ﬁrst comet internationally recognized
as someone's property: it was Edmond
Halley's comet. Comet naming became a
tradition, and it motivates most Messierlike hunters today.
By 1992 I'd attached my name to four
comets. But that same year, Spacewatch
at Kitt Peak attached its name to the
ﬁrst automated comet discovery. That
was a milestone: a robotic telescope collected the data, and software ﬂagged the
discovery images. Also in 1992 came the
Spaceguard Survey Report, a U.S. Congressional study that mandated a NASA
program to ﬁnd 90% of all Near-Earth
Objects (NEOs) larger than one kilometer
76

November 2015 sky & telescope

across. Spaceguard funding gushed after
the dramatic impact of Comet ShoemakerLevy 9 into Jupiter in 1994, as we Earthlings sought to protect our own planet
from a similar event.
With NASA funds, LONEOS and
NEAT, two more automated surveys,
began patrolling the night sky by 1995. The
SOHO satellite launched that year as well.
All these professional surveys, including
Spacewatch, started making discoveries,
but I had not found a comet in three years.
Obviously, visual hunters were headed for
extinction. In an article that year in CCD
Astronomy, I prophesied an end to visual
discoveries in perhaps a decade.
Happily for me, 1996 brought my ﬁfth
and ﬁnal comet. But LINEAR, yet another
automated survey, appeared that year, and
four years later the Catalina Sky Survey
began operations. Employing robotic
scopes in both hemispheres, CSS led NEO
discoveries by 2005. Next, in 2009, came
the launch of the Wide-ﬁeld Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft, followed
by its NEOWISE component. And in 2010,
Pan-STARRS in Hawaii started full-time
science observations with its 1.4-gigapixel
imaging camera.
Sky coverage widened still further
with the launch of the Canadian NEOSsat

in 2013, and the ATLAS Project received
funding that year as well. Using small
patrol scopes in Hawaii, ATLAS will be
able to scan the entire visible sky several
times each night by the end of 2015.
And whatever comets the satellites and
large professional surveys miss, amateuroperated CCD patrols quickly detect.
Suﬃce to say my 1995 prediction has
come true. With our planet in possible
danger from NEOs, the automated patrols
certainly oﬀer the best protection. But for
me and other visual hunters, it's a bittersweet moment. Robotic surveys have left
little meat on the bone for visual hunters.
In fact, it's been ﬁve years since the last
visual discovery, that of Comet IkeyaMurakami in 2010. Ikeya-Murakami may
very well be the ﬁnal Messier-like ﬁnd ever.
I for one am pleased to have lived during this very special time in astronomical
history, when an amateur could manually
sweep the night sky with a telescope and
discover an unknown comet. I'm proud I
helped ﬁnish what Messier started. ✦
Howard Brewington and his wife, Maya,
live in southern New Mexico. He recently
retired from New Mexico State University
as a telescope operator for the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey.
Sky and Telescope - November 2015

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