Comet Ison is coming

Everyone else in the world has known about this for about a week, but I've just become aware of a rather cool event happening towards the end of 2013.

Comet C/2012 S1 (common name Ison) is going to be coming in, and providing it survives its very tight orbit around the sun, should be visible to the naked eye between October 2013 and January 2014.  As someone who as a kid was into astronomy (and as I grew up complemented this with wedges of science fiction goodness) this is rather cool.

For those who like to muck about with stuff, you can play with a model of the comet on the Nasa website at http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=C%2F2012%20S1;orb=1

In other news, what colour are the dots in the picture below?

Image copyright Akiyoshi Kitaoki 2010, original accessible from http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/color13e.html

Left ones are green and the right ones are blue, yeah?

Nope.

They're all green.

This is a colour illusion called the land effect that I originally saw on the Vsauce channel - check out the video (with loads of other cool illusions)