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"Willersdorf" BO LA MOTTE |
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Proudly South African
Specializing in early season southern hemisphere export blueberry's.
Exports to the northern hemisphere from mid October.
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The South African Blueberry Company
est. 1992
Delivering quality "early to fruit" blueberry's when most needed.
Bo La Motte Farm
A courtesy provided by the South African Blueberry Company - Franschhoek South Africa
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Comet McNaught - Front Row Seats
You might ask what a comet has to do with blueberry's. Well nothing really, other than one looked down on them right out the front door.
Comet McNaught
Bo La Motte - Franschhoek - South Africa
Photographed over the pool, January 21st, 2007
"Willersdorf" at Bo La Motte Farm - Franschhoek South Africa Comet McNaught is said to have been the brightest comet in over 40 years and is now known as the Great Comet of 2007. It was discovered on August 7th 2006 by British-Australian astronomer Robert H. McNaught. It made perihelion on January 12, 2007, becoming easily visible to the naked eye for observers in the Southern Hemisphere.
Comet McNaught
Comet tails face away from the sun and are not at all caused by the direction the comet is traveling, rather by solar "wind". The first indication that the sun might be emitting a wind actually came from comet tails, observed to point away from the Sun, whether the comet was approaching the Sun or whether it was moving away. In the early 1600s, Kepler correctly guessed that those tails were driven by energy from the sun.
Click a thumb to open an image.
Comet McNaught over "Willersdorf" Bo La Motte Farm - Franschhoek South Africa.
Far out in space, the comet is nothing more than a dirty snowball. As it nears the sun and starts to experience it's heat, gases start to sublimate. i.e. change directly from solid to gas. As this happens, the imbedded dust grains are expelled with the gas. Eventually this dust and gas creates a large diffuse cloud around the nucleus. This cloud is referred to as the coma and is usually some tens of thousands of miles across and is what gives a comet its typical fuzzy appearance. As the comet comes closer to the sun, the solar wind, an energetic stream of particles continuously blowing off the sun's surface, encounters the material in the comet's coma and blows it back behind the nucleus. One can in fact think of a comet as a large windsock, with the tail extending in the direction of the solar wind's motion.
Spectacular images from around the globe.
South Africa
Click on a thumb to open an image.
By Leon van Heerden - Cape Town
Australia
By Gordon Garradd
New Zealand
Oamaru South Island
Chile
By G Blanchard
Easter Island
By Dennis Mammana
Aproximatly a dozen "new" comets are discovered each year. Short-period comets are more predictable because they take less than 200 years to orbit the Sun. Most come from a region of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. Less predictable are long-period comets, many of which arrive from a distant region called the Oort cloud about 100,000 astronomical units from the sun, "that is, 100,000 times the mean distance between Earth and the Sun". These comets can take as long as 30 million years to complete one trip around the Sun, where as it takes Earth only 1 year to orbit the Sun. As many as a trillion comets may reside in the Oort cloud, orbiting the Sun near the edge of the Sun's gravitational influence.
Three Cheers to Robert McNaught!
Click here to view an amazing astronomical web site...
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