I wanted to get some color data and make a color image but the skies had
other ideas. I got the data but it is so poor I didn't try to do a
color version. This time some bright stars decided to try and steal the
show. For such a small comet it is looking pretty good. It should as
it was only 0.081AU from us 7.5 million miles. That's still about 30
times the distance to the moon. It was .999 AU from the sun, a tad
inside our orbit as we are currently 1.012 AU from the sun. It's
nearness to us gives a rather distorted view of its size. Tails of
comets are often millions of miles long but the extent of the tail I
picked up is only 2000 miles long as projected onto the sky. It's real
length would be longer as we see it foreshortened. I didn't work out
how much. The icy core of the comet is thought to be about 1 kilometer
across or less making it a very small comet.

Now for clear skies Saturday morning to see if it left any 150 year old
debris for us to run into then.

Like before the image was taken binned 3x3 for a 1.5" per pixel image
scale. The gaps in the star-trails is due to the about 5 seconds
between image frames needed to feed the data down a slow USB 1.1 data
pipe the camera uses.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=20x1'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Rick

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Prefix is correct. Domain is arvig dot net

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