Australian record?

[pberrett]

Hi everyone

The manager of the Sungrazer Project has just confirmed my 50th and 51st comet discoveries which means I have, after several years work, reached past 50 Sungrazer comet discoveries.

https://sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil/confs-Aug2021

Is this an Australian record? Has any other Australian discovered 50 Sungrazer comets previously?

Honourable mention must be made of Alan Watson with 44 Sungrazer comets.

regards

Peter Berrett

[Nikolas (Nik)]

Don't know if it is but what an accomplishment!!!

[mura_gadi (Steve)]

Hello,

Big grats and welcome to area 51 of your comet searching...

With SOHO operating for nearly two decades I am amazed that your able to find new sun grazing comets at all. A vnc feather in the cap imo.


Steve

[pberrett]

Thanks

I started in 2012 and it took me a year before I had my first comet discovery, a Kreutz.

It's not hard to find a comet, there's a new one along everyone couple of days but the competition to be the first to report that comet is fierce. Some people even automatically download the raw FITS images as they come in and process themselves rather than wait 10 minutes for the processed images to be made available.

In light of this it wasn't a good use of my time to continue. However in 2013 I had studied a unit in Python at MIT EDX. For a few years I always had this idea of writing a python program to search through the archival images to look for missed comets. in 2019 I wrote my first draft of a program to do that and discovered a number of comets in the archives. However early versions of the program were slow and the output of the program required me, for each candidate found, to go back and look at the original images to judge whether what had been found was real or not. Using a couple of python libraries I have since been able to speed up my program significantly and also change the output to a series of postage stamp images that enable me to instantly tell me what has been found is a comet or not. For example:

Not a comet



Comet



Even so it takes quite a while to search through the candidates found. I am digging deeper and deeper into the noise and as one does so the number of false positives rises markedly.

This possibly means I would be the 2nd highest comet discoverer in Australia currently. Robert McNaught is the leader with 82 I believe.

I also have another couple of comet discovery announcements to make in the near future but not with soho images. I am just waiting on confirmation of the discoveries.

cheers Peter

[Stonius (Markus)]

I don't really have anything to add other than how impressed I am at the level at which you're operating. It's not really what you call amateur astronomer territory, more like professional non-affiliated. And being comets, you get to have all 50 named after you, correct? That's gotta feel good to have your name on little pieces of the heavens. I've always thought it a bit sad that supernovae don't work the same way.


But yeah, very impressed indeed, and good on you. I love it when I hear stories of people on here giving real contributions to science. It's pretty awesome. Me? I just like to look at pretty stuff, so there isn't going to be anything named after me anytime soon, lol.


Markus

[pberrett]

Thanks for the kind comments particularly the one about operating at a semi-professional level.

Incidentally I am having a bumper Fathers Day today with the discovery of both a Meyer and a Non-Group comet!

As to naming that's a bit of a sore point with me.

A few years ago the International Astronomical Union changed their naming rules for comets as follows:

https://minorplanetcenter.net/iau/in...uidelines.html

"3.4(b) Comets that are discovered from data or images made public
through printed publication or electronic posting (e.g.,
World Wide Web) are not eligible for individual names of
people and generally will not be named unless there is
an established program name for the origin of the images.
Such discoverers are considered members of the "team"."

So all my discoveries will get a designation eventually like C/1999 J6 (SOHO).

As Mick Jagger sang "I can't get no... satisfication"

What a discouragement to amateur astronomers.

cheers Peter