A cabin owner on another lake near Badger says he has also seen a large hole and unusual ice formations similar to a mysterious crater discovered on Dawe's Lake about six kilometres away.

Peter Butler said he was leaving his cabin on Powderhorn Lake on Sunday evening when he noticed a strange shape in the centre on the ice on the pond.

"It does appear that something punctured the ice and caused waves to form and travel over the ice," said Butler.

Butler said the hole was circular and about 30 metres across. He said water had seeped through the hole and frozen over, covering the initial hole with a thin layer of ice, water, and small fragments of ice. Butler also noticed ripples in the ice along the edge of the hole.

My thanks to Michele Casati for drawing my attention to the video above from NASA showing a double coronal mass ejection as comet Panstarrs passes overhead. This is more evidence for a link between sungrazing comets and CME's last discussed here in late 2011.

It also ties in with observations and successful predictions made by NASA scientist Ching Cheh Hung in his 2007 paper showing a correlation between the motions of the inner planets and overall levels of solar activity.

Cbet nr. 3439, issued on 2013, March 14, announces the discovery of a new comet (discovery magnitude ~14) by Masayuki Iwamoto (Awa, Tokushima-ken, Japan) on three 60-s CCD frames taken on March 10.8 & 11.8 with a Pentax 100-mm f/4 lens and a Canon EOS 5D digital camera. The new comet has been designated C/2013 E2 (IWAMOTO).

We performed follow-up measurements of this object remotely, from the iTelescope network (Siding Spring - MPC code Q62) on 2013, March. 14.8, through a 0.50-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD + f/4.5 focal reducer.

Below you can see our image, stack of 5x20-second exposures obtained at the twilight (few minutes before the sunrise) with the Sun only 10 degree below the horizon and the comet +27 degree above the horizon.
Here you can see a short animation (composed of 5x20-seconds exposures and spanning 5 minutes) showing the movement of the comet.

M.P.E.C. 2013-E67 assigns the following preliminary parabolic orbital elements to comet C/2013 E2: T 2013 Mar. 5.5; e= 1.0; Peri. = 92.93; q = 1.39; Incl.= 21.90.

The discovery of comet C/2013 A1 (SIDING SPRING) was announced on Cbet nr. 3368 & M.P.E.C. 2013-A14, issued on 2013, January 05. The comet was discovered on CCD images obtained by notable Australian observer R. H. McNaught with the 0.5-m Uppsala Schmidt telescope a few days earlier on Jan. 03 (with a discovery magnitude 18.6). Precovery images of the comet *(images taken but not known/recorded of the comet) by the Catalina Sky Survey from 8 December 2012 and Pan-STARRS from 4 October 2012 were subsequently found and then used in an attempt to determine the orbit.

It has been noted that C/2013 A1 will have a very close approach with planet Mars on October 19, 2014. With an observation arc thus far of 148 days, JPL/NASA give a nominal closest approach of ~0.0003578 A.U. which is around 53,500 km on 2014 Oct. 19 at approximately 19:28UT +/- 1:03. The comet will pass Mars at a relative velocity of 56 km/s. Early estimates for the diameter of the nucleus have varied from 5 up to 50 km.

Due to the uncertainty within the orbital calculations, there is also a very small possibility that the comet may impact Mars (~ from 0.1% to 0.01% according to how you handle the observations thus far. See here for more info about this).

By comparison below you can find a table of the the closest known approaches to the Earth by comets published on Minor Planet Center website. This list is intended to be complete for comets discovered after 1700 that approached the earth to within 0.1020 AU. It also includes a number of well-documented earlier approaches by periodic comets. C/1491 B1 allegedly came to within 0.0094 AU on 1491 Feb. 20.0 TT, but the orbit of this comet is very uncertain.

A rare bright comet shows up in the northern hemisphere this week, cruising past Earth with promise of spectacular naked-eye viewings of the giant ball of ice and dust streaking the twilight sky with a blazing tail.

Dubbed Pan-STARRS after the Hawaii-based telescope that first spotted it nearing our corner of the universe, the comet should be at its brightest from about Friday to the middle of next week, say astronomers.

It is the first to pass within our line of sight this year - squeezing between the sun and its nearest-orbiting planet, Mercury.

Comets this bright generally come by about every ten to 20 years.

The latest trajectory of comet 2013 A1 (Siding Spring) generated by the Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory indicates the comet will pass within 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) of Mars and there is a strong possibility that it might pass much closer. The NEO Program Office's current estimate based on observations through March 1, 2013, has it passing about 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) from the Red Planet's surface. That distance is about two-and-a-half times that of the orbit of outermost moon, Deimos.

Previous estimates put it on a possible collision course with Mars.

This video, above, is based on comet's orbit calculated by Leonid Elenin, which has it is coming within 58,000 km, and visualized by SpaceEngine software.

Two comets are putting on an amazing night sky show this month and some intrepid photographers have captured rare views of both celestial objects at the same time.

The photos of Comet Pan-STARRS and Comet Lemmon were taken by veteran space photographers in Chile and Australia in late February. At the time, both comets were visible from the Southern Hemisphere, though Comet Pan-STARRS is set to become visible from the Northern Hemisphere later this week.

One of the double-comet photos was taken by Yuri Beletsky, a Magellan Instrument Support Scientist at Las Campanas Observatory located in the Atacama Desert of Chile. Beletsky is an accomplished space photographer and used a Canon 5D Mark II camera with an exposure time of about 30 seconds on Feb. 28 to capture the rare sight of the two comets together.

A newfound comet is apparently on course to have an exceedingly close call with the planet Mars in October 2014, and there is a chance - albeit small - that the comet may even collide with the Red Planet.

The new comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) was discovered Jan. 3 by the Scottish-Australian astronomer Robert H. McNaught, a prolific observer of both comets and asteroids who has 74 comet discoveries to his name.

McNaught is a participant in the Siding Spring Survey a program that hunts down asteroids that might closely approach the Earth. He discovered the new comet using the 0.5-meter Uppsala Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, New South Wales, Australia.

A new experiment simulating conditions in deep space reveals that the complex building blocks of life could have been created on icy interplanetary dust and then carried to Earth, jump-starting life.

Chemists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Hawaii, Manoa, showed that conditions in space are capable of creating complex dipeptides - linked pairs of amino acids - that are essential building blocks shared by all living things. The discovery opens the door to the possibility that these molecules were brought to Earth aboard a comet or possibly meteorites, catalyzing the formation of proteins (polypeptides), enzymes and even more complex molecules, such as sugars, that are necessary for life.

"It is fascinating to consider that the most basic biochemical building blocks that led to life on Earth may well have had an extraterrestrial origin," said UC Berkeley chemist Richard Mathies, coauthor of a paper published online last week and scheduled for the March 10 print issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

While scientists have discovered basic organic molecules, such as amino acids, in numerous meteorites that have fallen to Earth, they have been unable to find the more complex molecular structures that are prerequisites for our planet's biology. As a result, scientists have always assumed that the really complicated chemistry of life must have originated in Earth's early oceans.

Initial Sighting Reports

27 February 2013 - D. Beebe, Gulf of Mexico, off Louisiana 03:05 CST

1 minute plus duration. South to Northwest, I was facing South. It was orange color and about Venus brightness. It fragmented into ~15 pieces and glowed orange/white leaving a very long tail of sparks directly behind it, then slowly faded away.

27 February 2013 - Bart. @ 27 03'0N; 092 03'2W - 03:30 Central USA

30 seconds duration. It was yellow to amber color and fragmented.