Alpy spectrum of comet C/2020F3 (Neowise)

Forums Comets C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) Alpy spectrum of comet C/2020F3 (Neowise)

#582887
John Coffin
Participant

Hi, I live on the Essex marshes with views almost to the horizon, so managed to get a spectrum of the coma of this comet on Tuesday am. Didn’t try for the tail. The Swan Bands are stunningly beautiful (to a spectroscopist). The image is the raw unprocessed spectrum.

This is an annotated plot of the spectrum, the relative intensity of the emission lines is not reliable because the instrument response was calibrated using Merak which was at an altitude of 20 deg but the comet was at only 10 deg. Neither the sky background or the solar spectrum was subtracted when processing the spectrum. The emission lines were labelled according to data in Richard Walker’s Spectral Atlas and on the following website http://web.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/comet/all.txt

The full size images are attached.

Robin can advise on whether the annotations are reasonable. John.