Here it is! Comet McNaught above Cape Town, South Africa!

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Comet McNaught C 2006 P1 above Table Mountain, Cape Town / Kaapstad / iKapa, South Africa, photographed just a night or two ago, on McNaught's return after diving around the Sun.

Below, McNaught's path through the Zodiac from 1 August 2006 to 28 January 2007, from Seiichi Yoshida's website. Yoshida is a Japanese astronomer associated with Project

Multitudinous
Image-Based
Sky Survey and
Accumulative
Observations

(and Misao 巻町操 is a 16-year-old girl ninja in an anime series).

Now McNaught flies back to the Oort Cloud beyond Pluto, and I don't know when it will be back again -- but maybe the Scots-Australian astronomer Rob McNaught knows!

Vleeptron was a day late, a dollar short, and a hemisphere wrong about the brightest comet to fly by Earth in 40 years, Comet McNaught.

But God Bless Internet Relay Chat! As I was bothering the neocons on Undernet #politics , one of the chatters was talking about McNaught -- she'd seen it and photographed it from her beachfront condo in Cape Town, South Africa!

The Cape, of course, is the Cape of Good Hope, the southwestern tip of Africa, and that's Cape Town's famous Table Mountain.)

This is one of four marvelous photos she sent me!

She writes:

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All taken dusk or predusk....and evening....compass direction..are you totally mad?????????? LOL West and that's all I know..I went with the flow! Nikon digital camera...!

I saw the comet the first time from the air landing here then I am sitting in my condo doing email and I see all these [camera] flashes going off on the beach..so I get up and look and OMG...I ran down and went with the flow each night! I am a friggin amateur!

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Of course that begs the question: Why the heck were the people on the beach using their flashes to try to photograph a comet in the night sky? Comet McNaught was happy to supply lots of its own light, and it's pretty unlikely that a digital camera flash is going to travel half a gazillion kilometers out into space, bounce off the comet, and come back to your camera.

So Vleeptron didn't miss the comet after all!

Halley's pal Newton believed God put all these strange objects in the night sky intentionally as a Puzzle so humans would try to solve it. Newton and Halley are Major Players in Earth's efforts to Solve God's Puzzle.

And remember the PizzaQ image of the palatial buildings and gardens in Scandinavia in 1598? The guy who built it and lived there was another Big Player in solving God's Sky Puzzle! (That's a hint, if you want to give it one last Guess, but I'll Answer it (PatfromCH got it right in a pvt e-mail) in a day or two.

Who has a gripe against Newton's Puzzle Theory? Are all these Comets and Shooting Stars and Supernovae and Eclipses and Moons and Planetary Rings and Nebulae just random accidents?

I'm hardly the fellow to try to Spread Religion to anyone. But What A Show in the Night Skies! What Mysteries! What Fireworks -- the Comet a few years ago that broke apart and plunged into Jupiter while we watched!

Leave A Comment if you think it's all just a random accident. Defend your position. Be passionate about your Belief In Nothing.