I gave a talk to Newbury

Forums Comets new visual comet discovery by Don Machholz I gave a talk to Newbury

#580209
Nick James
Participant

I gave a talk to Newbury Astro Soc last Friday when I said that it was now very unlikely that we would get visual comet discoveries. How wrong I was! Congratulations to Don and the other independent discoverers of this comet.

An ephemeris based on all the available astrometry up to this morning is here. It was produced using Bill Gray’s FindOrb. These elements are still very uncertain but it looks like it is heading to a perihelion in early December. It is currently moving south and the elongation is decreasing so it will become increasingly difficult to observe. From the UK it is currently a morning object amongst the galaxies in Virgo. The column headed “/sig gives some idea of the position uncertainty (in arcsec).

Any observations (astrometry, photometry or images) would be gratefully received.