[BAA Comets] Rising from Ashes or Dying Flash? Mega Outburst of Small Comet 289P/Blanpain in 2013

[Richard Miles]

Thanks Denis.

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) has had a new camera fully operational the last year or so. It is fitted on the 48-inch Palomar Schmidt used for the Palomar Sky Survey (POSS) and now has almost a 7deg x 7deg field with 2" fwhm - that's a little larger than the original 14-inch square plates! They can get down to mag 21 in 30 sec and try to survey the entire northern sky every few nights. The camera reads out in 8 sec. It's like the old POSS but about 1000x faster so it in principle would repeat the entire POSS (that took several years) in just 24 hours of observing time. It surveys in g, r and i filters, It has a 1.2-m aperture mechanical shutter that closes in 0.43 sec!

Folks may be interested to learn that I have been in correspondence with Quanzhi Ye the last week or two, as the team are going to use automatic detection of Comet 29P's outbursts with ZTF as a way of rating its discovery performance. As amateurs we keep a very close watch on 29P for outbursts and seem to successfully detect every such event having an outburst amplitude of at least 0.4 mag so our data will serve as one check on how well ZTF detects that type of transient / interloper.

Richard

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: denis buczynski 
  To: BAA Comets discussion list 
  Sent: Monday, June 24, 2019 9:00 PM
  Subject: Re: [BAA Comets] Rising from Ashes or Dying Flash? Mega Outburst of Small Comet 289P/Blanpain in 2013


  Hi Jeremy/all,
  It looks like the author of this paper has just discovered a comet:


  COMET C/2019 K4 (YE)
  Quanzhi Ye, California Institute of Technology, reports the discovery of
  a comet (discovery observations tabulated below) on CCD images obtained with
  the ZTF Camera on the 1.2-m f/2.4 Oschin Schmidt telescope at Palomar; the
  object shows a moderately condensed coma about 6"-8" in diameter and a broad
  tail approximately 40" long to the northwest (p.a. 310 deg).




  Denis Buczynski

  On Monday, 24 June 2019, 17:38:05 BST, Jeremy Shears <bunburyobservatory at hotmail.com> wrote: 




  ApJL pre-print on ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.07137


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