[BAA Comets] 46P now 6th magnitude

[Nick James]

Peter,

Yes, the diameter of the coma is now heading for one degree so short 
focus, wide-field instruments will be needed to estimate this one. I got 
my first image from Chelmsford tonight (attached) and comphot gives a 
magnitude of 6.0 and a coma diameter of 26 arcmin. That is for an object 
low down from my very light polluted garden in Chelmsford. Observers 
with dark skies where the comet is higher up are seeing magnitudes 
approaching 5.

Absolutely no sign of it in 11x80 bins from here but that is no surprise 
given my skies in that direction.

This should be a really nice comet to follow in wide-field instruments 
over the next month.

Nick.


On 30/11/2018 10:31, Peter Carson wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> I couldn't find 46P using 7x50 binos from home, although I didn't really expect to down in the bright light polluted sky.
> I managed an image using my 315mm reflector seehttp://www.astromania.co.uk/46P_20181129_2125_PCarson.jpg   The sky transparency kept changing as did the amount of cloud so I stacked the best run of 60 sec exposures. Shortly after I finished my exposure run and before I closed the observatory it started raining...nearly a bit of a disaster!
> Comphot gives Total integrated magnitude: 7.89 (radius 203.0 arcsec) which is a lot different from other measures. I assume I'm not seeing a whole coma because of the low altitude and bright sky so won’t be reporting that anywhere.
> If it clears tonight I'll try using my 100mm short focus refractor with its wider field of view to give a more condensed image.

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