Sean Williams

I started off the day reading this interesting article about the discovery of "carbon stars"--ancient white dwarfs with atmospheres almost entirely composed of carbon. They're rare, and they challenge our understanding of stellar evolution, and they're bound to end up in a space opera novel before long.

"The great mystery is why these carbon-atmosphere stars are found only between about 18,000 degrees and 23,000 degrees Kelvin. 'These stars are too hot to be explained by the standard convective dredge-up scenario, so there must be another explanation,' Dufour said."

The explanation, of course, is that they're alive.

Ah, the joy of west-facing shores.

Amanda and I made a special trip to the Grange Jetty Kiosk last night to watch Comet McNaught follow the sun into the sea. The Kiosk is a restaurant built right on the sand dunes, a favourite of mine with great food and (usually) excellent service. We had a table overlooking the beach, upon which I promptly perched my Penguinscope before settling down to dinner. Our waiter was kind enough to raise the blinds and turn off the outside lights so we could scour the skies.

At first I thought we'd missed it in the glorious sunset (see the pic below for the view from our table, grainy because it was taken from my phone), but keen-eyed Amanda spotted it in the end, so our efforts were not for (Mc)Naught. (Sorry.) The view wasn't quite as speccy as today's APOD, what with the lack of ruins in St Vincent's Gulf and all, but it was certainly more interesting than Halley's last visit. The tail was clearly visible, and it was nice to watch a comet set. I've never done that before.

All astronomy should be conducted from fancy restaurants. That's my firm conclusion from this adventure.