20131208 - A little something to be going on with

It is not the case that I have had nothing to write about, quite the reverse. I have been observing away :) with a couple of skipped observing periods. Every observing session is generating a good eight hours of processing etc to be fed to the CIOC_ISON group - which has now extended into other comets, +Neil Norman's Comet Watch group and also to be prepared for Geraint Jone's project at UCL. I do promise to post many of the images here of a number of comets - both large and small - in the next day or two.

Last Friday a Comet ISON Followup Meeting took place in the USA. The group I belong to CIOC_ISON was represented by +Padma Yanamandra-Fisher  and Elizabeth Warner who each gave a good talk about the work the group had been doing and especially about the good cooperation between the amateurs and professionals.

This was part of the NASA Comet ISON Observing Campaign.

I was lucky to be mentioned a few times during Padma's talk and one of my images shown. It was very good - Padma's talk I mean and I felt quite chuffed with my involvement through the Searchlight Observatory Network Observatory.

The talk was streamed and recorded so it is possible to visit the site and select the video. Elizabeth and Padma were first on in the second part - Comet ISON Follow-up 2 of 2 the whole set of videos are available here . Geraint Jones of UCL also gave one of the talks. I will be submitting a number of our images for his Comet Tail Project.

2nd December morning - Comet C/2013 R1 Lovejoy and C/2013 V3 Nevski and a little on ISON

After nearly a week of cloudy skies I had a good observing run yesterday morning :)

I first went to Comet Lovejoy. I was using the wide field 4" F4 Refractor along with an ST8 CCD Camera. This comet is getting better, brighter and clearer each time I observe it. It was discovered by Terry Lovejoy in Australia, this is his 2nd Christmas Comet and I will say more about him in another post. He is most certainly an astronomer's astronomer. It is visible to the naked eye and well worth looking for.

I had decided that I wanted to image the whole of the comet, which because of its length meant that I would have to take a series of images, starting with its head and working along the tail.

I took them between UT 2013-12-02 5:00:34.063   and  2013-12-02T05:14:50.329 . Each image has an FOV of FOV 116.5 x 77.7 arcmins - north is on the left! You really need to click on the image to see it better!

I took seven images.each 1 minute exposure - no binning - and overlaid them.

Using simple trig the comet as displayed is a touch over 5 degrees in length. It was not until I processed the images that I realised that I had not captured the full length of the tale. I was not able to do a retake this morning, so fingers crossed for tomorrow, but it will need this evening's winds to drop. :( If it is clear then I will do x2 binning but keep the exposure time to 1 minute. That will bring out the furthest parts of the tail. As this will produce smaller images it will make it easier to create the overall image. The comet is moving against the back drop of stars, so I have to move onto taking the next image directly after the previous one, (partially guessing I am moving the right way :) ). so that there is no perceptible change.

As well as the above image I took a series of shorter exposures of the comet head. These exposures are between half a second and ten seconds. I also took a colour image as well. These are still to be processed. I used a series of the shorter images with Astrometrica by Herbert Raab to get a N Magnitude of 8.8

The next comet I images was C/2013 V3 Nevski. It is quite recently discovered - 6th November - by Vitali Nevsky using an 8" F1,5 reflecting telescope. Vitali is no stranger to discovering comets. He, along with Artyom Novichonok, discovered Comet C/2012 S1 ISON.  When discovered it was magnitude 15.1. Fellow CIOC_ISON member +Charles Bell  imaged it on the 14th November and its N Magnitude was 15.6. There had been reports that it had brightened to about magnitude 10 however when I imaged it yesterday morning the N  magnitude was 14.7.

Here is my image taken UT 2013-12-02 5:58:27.454 - FOV 116.5 x 77.7 arcmins - north is at the top. The comet is to the right of centre. It is still quite small, though a short tail has been observed.

I then took a few of Comet Linear and I will put these on next time. After Linear I did try for a couple of others, but my processing has not yet brought them out. They were a bit fainter.

To complete the observing run I finally I went to the the Eastern Horizon to see if I could capture the poor remains of C/2012 S1 ISON, but it was too bright - the sky that is, not ISON. If the weather is OK I will trying tomorrow morning.  Is there anything to see? We just do not know yet.

Before I finish for the night I must mention a particular hang out that you may wish to look at. It is the Comet Festival South Bend Today I watched yesterdays and today's editions. They have good astronomers on there and today's edition - hosted by +Chuck Bueter had +Pamela Gay , +Karl Battams and CIOC_ISON's +Padma Yanamandra-Fisher  (heck I hope I have the links right - if I have not - sorry!). Yesterday's edition was great as well, especially as it had my favourite astronomer, +Alex Filippenko, on.