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Congratulations are due again for his latest discovery. Attachments:
Well done for getting on to Terry’s latest so quickly. It looks like it is heading for perihelion sometime around April 23rd.
Orbital elements: TJL006
Perihelion 2017 Apr 23.983223 +/- 0.434 TT = 23:35:50 (JD 2457867.483223)
Epoch 2017 Mar 12.0 TT = JDT 2457824.5 Earth MOID: 0.0106 Find_Orb
M 359.08845 +/- 0.6
n 0.02120705 +/- 0.0207 Peri. 88.82430 +/- 1.1
a 12.9265452 +/- 8.4 Node 222.71050 +/- 0.34
e 0.9622537 +/- 0.0245 Incl. 87.87017 +/- 0.10
P 46.48 H 14.7 G 0.15 U 10.1
q 0.48792827 +/- 0.00425 Q 25.3651622 +/- 71.1
From 88 observations 2017 Mar. 9-12; mean residual 0″.70Thank you Nick. After hearing about Terry’s discovery I checked out “The possible Comet Confirmation Page” http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/NEO/pccp_tabular.html and listed the emphemerides to get basic time and location info. I dual imaged with both the C14 and the 4″ F4 Pentax, starting when the comet was 4 degrees above the horizon. As it turned out the RA&Dec position in the emphem. were about 10 arc mins out, so it was off plate for the C14, but on for the Pentax. It was a devil of a job to find it on the low resolution image even after stacking with Astrometrica using the “/min & P.A. motion info from the site.
Note for some: All though not obvious you can backdate the emphem by putting a negative number in the :
Start ephemerides at now + hours
With the latest astrometry the ephemeris positions should be reasonably good now. This comet is coming north rapidly but the elongation is also decreasing. According to the current astrometry it crosses the equator northbound on March 28 moving through Equuleus in the morning sky.
MPEC 2017-E86 confirms this object as C/2017 E4 (Lovejoy).
Terry Lovejoy’s latest comet, C/2017 E4, is now just visible from UK latitudes (52N). At the end of a long clear night of comet observing I imaged it at 0415 UT when the comet was 11 deg above the horizon and the Sun was 14 deg down. It’s not a very good image compared with observers further south and it only shows the brightest central part of the coma but it is there! Visual observers are putting it around 9th mag but the observing circumstances remain challenging for the UK.
This comet is running much brighter than expected and it is now reasonably placed for the UK as a morning object low in the east at the start of astronomical twilight. John Toone found it by accident this morning while observing AG Peg and described it as looking a bit like a globular cluster in large binoculars.
It is well worth setting your alarm clocks to observe this comet 🙂 This image was taken this morning well before breakfast. - You must be logged in to reply to this topic.