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Good image. I suspected there would be significant constraints but didn’t know the detail – the idea was probably put forward by that comet Hergenrother journalist!
Yes. I think I read somewhere that if the comet interceptor mission had already been deployed, this would have been one helluva target.
The comet moved away from a mag 13.4 star and I managed to get a set of frames before the sky started brightening noticeably. The sky was excellent though and I saw Sirius rising! Taken through a Baader V filter.
I certainly agree with you on the effect of the internet. On a brighter note – I was pleasantly surprised last night by being able to pick up tails on 260P and C/2018 N2. I imagine light-buckets are required though for visual observers.
Don’t be too hard on yourself, Dominic. I did in fact do a bit of web searching to see where the Mirror journalist may have got this information. And I had a look at in the sky.org . Your site had nothing about 21:15 being the best time to spot the comet, nor did your site say it was super bright (it wasn’t even in the top three brightest comets) / even in the naked eye range.
We should do a correction. Simply everything is wrong. The picture doesn’t look like an artist’s impression to me, it looks like an image of another comet; the comet is very very dim (one 2019 obs on COBS ~ mag 17, and perhaps unreliable); the time of best visibility is not 21:15 BST (02:45 BST, 36deg alt due east in astro darkness for me). Where is this information from??????
Yes. I usually use Polaris as my first alignment star as it – very obligingly – drifts only very slowly without sidereal tracking engaged. Plus, as Polaris is a double star, one can straightaway suss out the optical performance of the telescope and atmospheric conditions too before completing alignment and engaging tracking.
Cheers Paul. It does sound like a fun project that could be written up for a short report in the Journal. Perhaps when I have some spare time, I’ll follow your advice and look into this a bit more.
Maybe the BAA should establish a (very) long-term project where its members follow the movement of the celestial pole.
Here’s another image. As Nick’s image shows, and indeed Robin’s spectrum indicates, the object is very blue. I’ve uploaded a higher quality image to my member’s page.
LOL. Would you ask your weather owl if it can arrange for the fog here to be ‘burned off’, so that I might, this evening, have a look at the dwarf nova in Monoceros that Robin has highlighted. Or does the owl just predict the weather? It faintly reminds me of a favourite character from childhood – the mechanical owl in the 1981 Clash of the Titans, constructed by Hephaestus so that Athena does not have to be parted from her beloved pet.
Hi Robin. Very interesting. Am I right in thinking this would be consistent with an accretion disk in an optically thick state? Or are there other – perhaps more likely – explanations?
