after about 45 minutes of tracking with the 15". Since the evening began clearing early, I decided to try for both asteroid 2007 TU 24 and Comet Wirtanen. The sky was clear but hazy, and remained average for seeing. There was no sign of the asteroid after about an hour of searching, so I switched to the comet. The guide stars (delta and epsilon Piscium) were visible and the comet should have been about equidistant, one full Telrad circle, to the south of both stars, so it should not have been difficult to get the rough FOV. Within this FOV, there were two distinct visual double stars and a short line of 5 mag stars to define the area. A candidate was quickly found, all alone in the FOV. Adding power, it appeared to be SLOWLY opening some distance with a lone field star at about 200x, and it had a faint 'comet-ty' color to it., and could not be brought to focus. Small, compact, no tail, but bright. The coma that shows in Pete's latest photos was not apparent visually. The object appeared to be in the correct location against the wider FOV field stars, but when I got enough power to see that it was fuzzy and blue, there was only that one star in sight. Over the observation period, the separation between the suspected Wirtanen and the star increased about 25% (I think...). I would love to have had about twice the observation period to be certain that the shift relative to the field star was not wishful thinking. Even the fuzzy appearance was not definitive, since the air was not steady tonight, and most things were hard to focus at high power. For instance, on Mars tonight, there were albedo features at 60x, which got me all excited, but I could not get a good focuse above 120x. So, take it for what it's worth: maybe I had a Wirtanen sighting tonight.
