Comet Panstarrs naked eye

[swannies1983 (Dan)]

Went down the beach last night and had a great view of it. Arrived at around 8.30 and I thought I had missed it because I couldn't see it. After several frantic minutes sweeping the area where I thought it would be, I eventually saw a fuzzy patch. Started imaging at around 8.40 until just after 9. I reckon it was best visually around 8.50 before getting amongst the murkiness of the horizon.

[Yaar (Zain)]

Originally Posted by mithrandir

According to CdC, PANSTARRS should be visible in Karachi from around the end of March, and circumpolar by late April.

If you can't update your ssystem.ini, why not try CdC?

Thank you Andrew. I had tried CdC a couple of years ago. An observing buddy and a senior member of our club is a die-hard fan of it. But Stellarium's GUI is quite addictive Will give CdC a shot again sometime.

Thanks to Dan in Indiana, I just learned that we no longer have to add orbital elements manually. You can go to the Configuration Window in Stellarium, then Plugins, Solar System Editor, Solar System and Add new solar system objects. From the configuration window I could also replace the old ssystem.ini file with the new one having the elements of ISON and PanSTARRS, and it is working.

Clear skies to us all.

[Terry B]

It has mostly cleared here in the Northern Tablelands tonight with only some clouds in th east.
I went looking for comet panstarrs about 2015 and found it very low on the horizon. It was visible naked eye only about 10deg above the horizon. With small binos I could easily make out a tail.
I couldn't see a tail naked eye but it did appear "fuzzy" with averted vision.
I didn't bother trying to photograph it as it is cold and blowing a gale.
Cheers

Terry

[Barrykgerdes]

I modified my Comet finder program to arrange the orbital elements from the data base and write a stellarium insert. Data base has all the comets listed on the MPC site. I wrote a similar program that finds a number of asteroids and also writes an entry for the stellarium ssystem.ini. A third program can generate orbital parameters from three sightings of a comet or asteroid and also write an entry for the stellarium ssystem.ini file.

The programs are are all written and compiled in QB64 a version of Quickbasic that will run on 64bit platforms from "Astronomy with your personal computer by Peter Duffet-Smith"

Barry

[seeker372011 (Narayan)]

Sighted but only with binocs; by the time it got darker lost it behind low cloud on the horizon.

From Winston Hills, Western Sydney, Buckleys Road

[Paul Haese]

Seen it naked eye from Millicent and now from Adelaide on Windy Point. Quite bright but still around mag 4 in my estimation. I have read accounts of being mag 2 but I doubt this as it is just visible to the naked eye and tail ever so faintly visible.

[Rob_K]

Saw it again tonight - first picked it up in binoculars at 8:15pm in blue sky, and it was faintly visible naked-eye at that stage, with very faint tail. Got better & better - ran around to a mate's place to get him to have a look and ended up with a fair crowd! No-one had any trouble spotting it naked eye and seeing the tail by that stage, even kids (or maybe I should say 'even adults'?) - the sky was still so light that there were no stars visible within cooee of it so it was very easy to point out.

One young boy asked me how far away it was - when I told him it was getting fairly close to the Sun now he seemed most surprised. I think he thought it was something in our atmosphere! Binocular views were great, the small inner coma (false nucleus) is so intense.

As the comet moves sunward we're getting a better view of it from here as it is setting against lower & lower hills. But hills are hills and we can't see it down into the horizon unfortunately, maybe to somewhere round 5-6 degrees tonight. Kept imagining what it would look like in a dark sky!

After PANSTARRS had set & the sky had darkened I had a look at C/2012 F6 (Lemmon) through binoculars - nice, but unfortunately it has now moved into town skyglow from our end of town and there is no chance of a naked-eye sighting.

Attached is an image I took last night of the comet head, using a NexImage webcam through a 4.5" f8 reflector. The width of the frame is 14 arcminutes. I could imagine some of the planetary imagers on IIS getting cracker shots of the head, not that there's much time left!

Cheers -

[Russ59]

Can someone offer some suggestions for some The best way to capture using a DSLR. I've never attempted something so close to sunset. I initially thought of multiple exposures and stack in DSS but what exposure time?

Russ

[Wavytone]

You want a fast lens - ideally shoot at f/2 to f/4, ISO 800-1600, for 10-30 secs depending on the focal length of your lens.

I'm using a compact tonight Oanasonic LX5 and expecting to capture both comets in 1 frame using ISO400, 1 minute at f/2 with a wide angle lens (the lens is a Leica Summilux)

[Larryp (Laurie)]

Finally got to see it tonight in my 7x50s. Nucleus very bright and tail prominent even in twilight. It's a beautiful comet!

[andyc (Andy)]

Hi Paul, interested you think it's as faint as near mag 4? It's clearly naked-eye low in the twilight from my Melbourne location - I don't think I could see mag 4 stars that low in that direction even in full darkness looking west over the city! That deep in twilight, to me, it must be rather brighter. In reference to Deneb Kaitos (Beta Ceti, mag 2.0), which is a bit higher in the twilight, I'd say it was definitely fainter than that star, but within a magnitude in brightness. Can't see it being fainter than 3 at the moment. But of course I may be wrong, and regardless it's a very pretty thing in the evening sky! A treat in the big binoculars too with a degree of tail. Hope you and everyone else has clear skies to see it before it heads north.

[doppler (Rick)]

Finally the clouds cleared first time in weeks here in Mackay. My daughter got this pic with her 1100d canon ... single 10 seconds at iso 6400 f5 165mm. at 7.33 pm est. I think that is a shooting star at the top(its not in the image before or after). Just visible to the naked eye but quite bright in the 12 x 60 binoculars.