Another Interstellar Visitor - Comet C/2019 Q4

[billdan]

A new 20Km wide comet has been seen that is 3 AU from the Sun and it appears to have come from a different star system.
Known as Comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) - has a hyperbolic orbit eccentricity of 3.2, based on current observation.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49676757

[xelasnave]

This is exciting. I don't imagine we could launch anything to gather some dust...dust possibly from another solar system.
Alex

[Sunfish]

Thanks for that. All over the news also and so people seem interested.

I am sure a lot of astronomers will have their spectrographic analysis underway and we might hear what the tail is made up of.

Perhaps some our own members could tell us.

[Sunfish]

Look at Grennady Borisov and the 0.65m scope he built. What sort of instrument is that, SCT, Maksutov?

https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/possible-interstellar-comet-headed-our-way/

[Sunfish]

https://rastreadoresdecometas.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/gennady-borisov/?fbclid=IwAR08HvM_rKyYfTgK8Vvge6qII eflDvZqvGiHlsTiLvouMAR25AIu_AGR8NQ

[bigjoe]

Its travelling incredibly quickly if you consider the average speed of stars relative to the Sun in the solar neighborhood is 20 km/s.

Its on a rapid (41km/s+) , highly eccentric, hyperbolic orbit from another Star system..
So indeed... Another visitor!
Bigjoe

[billdan]

It looks like a F2 hyperstar setup, there is no room to have a camera and focuser behind the mirror on that fork mount.

Appears us Sth Hemisphere folk are going to get the best chance of seeing it around the 10th Dec at its closest approach to the sun. Its DEC will be -20° near the constellation Sextans.

[DeWynter]

Custom built f1.5 scope with aperture 650mm.

[Sunfish]

Thanks for the answers people and that photo of the scope mounted. Could not find that?

Now that is a project for those Byers worm drives. A hyper hyper star. Is the mirror spherical or some more complex shape I wonder.

[DeWynter]

Photos are from a video interview on youtube.

It's a Hamiltonian catadioptric. It's been built by the author including the fork mount.

[gary]

Story here :-
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-ready-interstellar-astronomers.html

Paper here :-
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.06387.pdf

[Sunfish]

Interesting stuff Gary.
An interstellar hail storm.
All our planets are more than pretty pictures.

[gary]

Full Press Release :-
https://www.qub.ac.uk/News/Allnews/Newfrontierforscienceasastronomersd etectgasmoleculesincometfromanother star.html

The research has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters for scientific peer review, and is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.12144

[Sunfish]

Very interesting thanks Gary. That analysis was quick off the mark.

Same material but from another system.

So we don’t have to go up there to find out although it seems like that might also be a possibility.

[gary]

Story, images here :-
https://news.yale.edu/2019/11/26/new-image-offers-close-view-interstellar-comet

[gary]

Press release & image here :-
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/image-more-details-interstellar-comet-borisov

[Sunfish]

Half a kilometre is still a large chunk of ice. I think the one that caused the 4.5 km Goss Bluff crater was about 1km.

[gary]

Hi Ray,

And if it hit us whilst it was moving at 177,000 km/h and in the worse
case combined with the Earth's orbital speed of 107,000 km/h head-on,
then it would certainly get everyone's attention.

[bgilbert]

2I/borisov
Attempt to catch boris, on dec 6, at Lowe observatory at Bendemeer, about 2 days after the fires approached the dome 3 times and was water bombed lights at 10 secs, ISO 25000, stacked with AutoStakkert, altitude 1100 m, some smoke 3 comets spotted that night by Chris Wyatt, the local comet watcher, all around Mag. 15. The reason for short exposures and very high ISO, was because periodic error in RA and no guiding. Also the collimation is poor because had to rotate the tube for each comet to be able to access the eyepiece, It's a big scope. we would have had to collimate before each comet and we had no time, sunrise was approaching, as It was It ruined 40 light frames.
We are having trouble stacking and any help would be appreciated. We would prefer stars trailing and the comet stationary.
.
253472
.
https://get.google.com/albumarchive/111428981799906186732/album/AF1QipM9CBdPfqclJ5QwmiQRudJjYYgN_14 a_iT9QhPn?authKey=CL-_8JyQicTwBQ

.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Ix0jryh7gjD1XhmLHgI3gfxBkQ Nw6xaV

[Dennis]

Hi Barry

The 1st http link would not work for me - it asked for a User sign in and I don't have a Google Account.

The 2nd link warned that it would not open as the file was over 200MB.

Cheers

Dennis

[bgilbert]

sorry dennis try the attachment

253471

[Dennis]

Thanks Barry, you nailed it, the comet is clearly visible centre frame.:thumbsup:

I used 4 programs to plot the position; The Sky X Pro, Starry Night Pro 8, Sky Safari and SkyTools 4 and all of them indicated positions several degrees apart.:question:

I made sure that I refreshed all the Comet Elements for each program via downloads and checked that my observing site and details were all the same and correct, so not sure why the variation - I suspect they must use different sources?:shrug:

Cheers

Dennis

[bgilbert]

. G'day Dennis,
One of our club members, Chris Wyatt is a comet watcher and belongs to an international organization of some sort (I can get details). He monitors several comets on a weekly basis and submits details, the details are then used to update position mag. etc. The position of 2I/borisov may be still being upgraded, as of the 6 Dec. no southern hemisphere submissions had been registered, the submission by Chris, being the first in the southern hemisphere to observe it,
. I'm trying to convince a friend of mine who works at siding springs to to stick an eyepiece or camera on the 3.9m or the 2.3 m., they are not generally used any more for visual observing. The 2.3 m is a possibility, it just needs an adapter to be machined and to sneak in some time somehow, it's generally fully booked.
. The other possibility is the 41 inch Milroy telescope at Coonabarabran, it is now privately owned, but I have earned some time on it, by performing maintenance on it. At its peak it was mag.15.5, it will be receding now, but with big scopes should be able to track it for months, depending on smoke.
. The other possibility is, our club, has managed to acquire one of the only two Hewitt cameras in the world, look up Hewitt camera on web.
. We replaced the film handling stuff and machined up a camera holding device and fitted a ZWO APS-C cooled sensor (forgotten it part number).
. This camera is 24 inch aperture f1 schmitt with field flattener, 34 inch mirror, made by Grubb and Parsons and weighs 9 tons, we added a ton to it for some reason. The full story is on our club website.

http://www.tamworthastronomy.com.au/

Cheers,
Barry

[Dennis]

Thanks for that Barry, and the link to the Tamworth Club - I enjoyed browsing around there.:)

If I were trying to hunt down 2I/Borisov (aka C4/2109 Borisov) I would start off with the JPL Horizons (https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi) website as it has always been accurtae when I have been imaging NEO's and the fainter moons of Uranus and Neptune.

Cheers

Dennis

[bgilbert]

. G'day Dennis

. I thought you might be interested that one of our club members managed to image 2I/borisov with a 6 inch refractor, using about 5 minute integrate time with a cooled ZWO mono camera, and a good dose of smoke.
. It will probably appear on our club website shortly. We are contemplating registering our images on the Comet Observation Database COB, because there are no officially recorded images from the southern hemisphere, and we would like to represent Aussie amateurs.
. We could also provide assistance to iceinspace members on how to find, and image the comet with almost any telescope setup. The comet is about mag 15 or so at the moment probably fading to mag 20 in about twelve months and wont be returning any time soon, and remember it is the first interstellar comet ever observed.

[Dennis]

Thanks Barry and a big well done to to the person that managed to grab an image.:thumbsup:

A few weeks ago I did have an opportunity (clear skies, no smoke :)) but The Sky X Pro put me in the wrong place, so my FOV missed the comet by about 5 or 6 degrees...:(

Was your colleague tracking on the comet for the 5 minute exposure, as I assume it would show quite a bit of movement against the BG stars for that length of time?

Cheers

Dennis

[bgilbert]

G'day Dennis

. I will pass on your congratulatory comments to my colleague.
On the occasion in question he only tracked the stars, so the comet trailed slightly. He will have another attempt when the moon and smoke allow, using RGB filters, probably with half an hour for each colour, and attempt to track the comet.
. I have attached about a month out of an ephemeris that seems accurate so far, It has about two to three weeks left on it.
.
254213

[gary]

Hi Dennis,

The problem originates at the Minor Planet Center (MPC).

2I/Borisov has a very, very high orbital eccentricity (in the order of ‎3.3575)
and the orbital elements are just the solution for a two-bodied problem.

The orbit is sufficiently perturbed that unless you are using very recent
orbital elements (check the epoch), the computed position will be
degrees out.

Something is up at the MPC. The elements they have been publishing
for the software packages for some comets have epochs that are
weeks and months out of date compared to the recent epochs used
for the orbital elements they also publish separately as raw data.

The asteroid elements for the software packages are even worse
where they were last computed for epochs in 2018.

Many of these orbits have been perturbed since then.

They had some computer system failures some time back and things have
been out of kilter since then.

The workaround is to use the data either they or JPL supply when
you examine an individual object and synthesise the elements from that.

How you then load your own elements into the package of choice I will
leave as an exercise for you but it may not be possible for all packages.

Alternatively, just use the MPC web page that allows you to compute the
RA/Dec position at multiple points in time, say every 5 minutes in the evening.
Those positions are accurate.

[bgilbert]

G'day Dennis and Gary.

. Stellarium 0.19.2 has two occurrences of 2I/Borisov, one of them is fine, the one on the left of the image after you load it. The ephemeris I posted is also fine, It's derived from Guide 9.

Cheers Barry

[Dennis]

Thanks Gary, I appreciate your insight into the problem.:)

In the end, it was 2 phased issues with The Sky X Pro.

First of all, TSX was not (originally) designed to handle objects with the large/unusual eccentricity of 2I/Borisov, but the Bisque Website provided what they reasonably believed to be a suitable, interim solution whilst also notifying their user community of a soon-to-be released Daily Build that would fix that issue.
Then, the interim solution proposed, which was to point the Comet Input dialogue to an external 3rd party set of elements, did plot the comet but unfortunately, there may have been some issue with the accuracy of those elements as the plotted position of the comet was a few degrees off.

The Bisque website also provided another solution, which was a Copy/Paste of the elements from the JPL Horizons website which did plot the real position, but by then, the clouds rolled in and have hung around so I haven’t had the opportunity to try again.

C’est La Vie.;)

Cheers

Dennis

[Dennis]

Thanks Barry, the good folks at Software Bisque have fixed the issue and I can also navigate (GoTo) 2I/Borisov using SkyTools 4, but if you could do something about this pesky cloud cover, I would certainly appreciate that.;):)

Cheers

Dennis

[gary]

20th April 2020 NRAO press release.

2I/Borisov likely formed in extremely cold environment, high amounts of carbon monoxide show

https://public.nrao.edu/news/alma-reveals-unusual-composition-of-interstellar-comet-2i-borisov/

[gary]

Press release, video here :-
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/nasa-s-swift-mission-tallied-water-from-interstellar-comet-borisov