Comets 213 Van-Ness and C2009 F4 McNaught

[rogerg]

Hi all,

The other night I decided to start interweiving my supernova runs with regular observations of all comets mag 20 or brighter. There's currently 46 fitting that criteria and within suitable RA & Dec ranges.

I'm doing 5 x 2mins on each comet. That lets me easily get through them in a night, with a couple of hours to spare.

A couple that showed up nicely:

213 Van-Ness and;
C/2009 F4 McNaught

.. were the only two that showed vaguely interesting form. Others were either insignificant dots or there were problems wih the imaging of them.

The images aren't great, trailing in one direction or the other and not perfect focus. Still got some refining to do on the setup.

Van-Ness has a decent sized tail on it! A more illongated nucleus than I'm used to in a comet also, perhaps due to its movement but it isn't moving that fast. Wouldn't mind doing a longer exposure sometime.

Some tech details of the pics..
5 x 2mins each
0.86 arc sec/pixel
Fl~2180
Clear filter with ST7ME.
Unguided.

I'm looking forward to continuing this and building up a nice history of the comets appearances over months.

Roger.

[Liz]

They are excellent Roger!!! :thumbsup:
Am a lover of comets, so to see these 2 with lovely tails is great.
Yikes, hadnt even heard of Van-Ness. :question:

[rogerg]

Thanks Liz :) Yes, don't think I'd heard of Van-Ness before either.

[Outbackmanyep]

Awesome stuff Roger!
213P is eluding me at the moment, it's around 13.5 - 14th Mag but must be quite diffuse, the zodiacal light seems to wash it out when i have been viewing it, keep them pics coming!
You should send them to Seiichi Yoshida at www.aerith.net (http://www.aerith.net)

Cheers!

[rogerg]

Thanks .. and for the link :)

Think I've just got an auto FTP process working so once the images are processed I can easily FTP all the stack images to a server by one button ... could be fun.

[Rob_K]

Very nice work Roger, well done! :thumbsup: There are very few images of 213P around the web and yours is the best I've seen! Bit of a surprise that there are so few images really as it looks such a nice comet in your image. As far as the diehard comet imagers go, it's pretty bright at > mag 14 and at -12 Dec ATM not in the worst position even for many northerners (not that it worries them, lots image remotely from Australia). :shrug:

Cheers -

[h0ughy]

Roger, How cool is this? Excellent shots and work tracking them down