[BAA Comets] 289P/Blanpain

[Peter Tickner]

I raised issues about this on the UK Occultation group as there is no sign of it and even professional observatories can only see a faint smudge.  I first looked in December and concluded someone at the Minor Planet Centre must have put the decimal point in the wrong place for the magnitude which on my chart was coming up at 2.8 back then. Dave Herald and Steve Tomkin have both since confirmed magnitude lower than 20 last month and Dave has also stated that even the mag 21 showing on some sky charts was also in error by around a magnitude. 

Peter

Sent from my iPhone

> On 25 Mar 2020, at 08:46, Andrew Robertson <andrew at fast-mail.net> wrote:
> 
> P.S. I did once think I'd seen it and did a positional sketch, it was a mag 15.5 GX so a similar sighting could explain a mistaken identification by someone.
> 
> Andrew
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Comets-disc [mailto:comets-disc-bounces at lists.britastro.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Robertson
> Sent: 25 March 2020 08:31
> To: 'BAA Comets discussion list' <comets-disc at lists.britastro.org>
> Subject: Re: [BAA Comets] 289P/Blanpain
> 
> Hi Nick,
> 
> I looked for it several times with my 24" up until a few weeks ago (gave up) and absolutely nothing, not even the slightest hint of 'maybe' something there.
> 
> Andrew
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Comets-disc [mailto:comets-disc-bounces at lists.britastro.org] On Behalf Of Nick James
> Sent: 25 March 2020 07:28
> To: BAA Comets discussion list <comets-disc at britastro.org>
> Subject: [BAA Comets] 289P/Blanpain
> 
> Morning all,
> 
> This comet has caused a lot of comment this year since the MPC published magnitude parameters which implied that it would be quite bright but, in fact, it was very faint. The current MPC params are currently predicting mag 3.8 for last night. JPL Horizons is predicting 22.0 so quite a large difference!
> 
> I noticed that on COBS a visual observer has been reporting the comet to be around mag 13 but recent images from my observatory show nothing to mag 20. The current COBS data is here:
> 
> https://www.cobs.si/analysis2?plot_type=0&end_date=2020/03/26%2000:00&col=comet_id&obs_type=0&id=875&start_date=2020/01/01%2000:00
> 
> The last image we have showing this comet in the BAA archive is on 2020 Feb 6 when it was around 18.5. This matches the Kevin Hills data in COBS for Feb 12.
> 
> Has anyone imaged this comet in the last month? Is there anything that could explain the visual observation other than mis-identification?
> 
> Nick.
> 
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