The Comet Section image archive here is one of the largest archives of its type in the world. We welcome images from all observers, whether BAA members or not but would request that you follow the submission and filenaming instructions set out below. An image sent with a radom filename such as PanStarrs.jpg with no other information leaves the person (Denis Buczynski) who receives and archives the images with a lot of work to do! In addition to the filename please also either annotate the image with key details (e.g. comet and observer name, scale, orientation, instrumentation and location or add this to a separate text file named as set out below.

Comet image naming format

The filename should correspond to the following format:

comet_yyyymmdd_observer.img

or

comet_yyyymmdd_hhmm_observer.img.

comet should either be the full provisional designation, for example 2001q2 or the periodic number, for example 19p.

observer can either be your full name for example shanklin, the first three letters of your name for example sha, or your ICQ id for example sha02. We will check that this is unique the first time that you submit and image and will let you know if it isn’t.

yyyymmdd is year month day and hhmm is hour and minute, ideally of the nid-time of the exposure or drawing.

img is the image format. We can accept JPG, GIF or PNG.

Putting this together, example image file names might be:

2001q2_20010906_sha02.jpg

or

19p_20010906_0300_sha02.gif

It is desirable to include details of the telescope, scale, orientation, camera, wavelength etc in the image, but if this is not possible you should write an additional text file with this information. This should have exactly the same name as the image but with .txt appended, i.e. 2001q2_20010906_sha02.jpg.txt. You can put any other text that you like in this file (observing comments etc) and it will be included in the archive. An example of this is here.

Please submit your images to cometobs[at]britastro.org.