Comet Lulin

10sec exposures spaced at one min intervals for about an hour. The comet was moving ~0.2 deg/hour. For reference the brightest of the stars in this field was ~12.6 mag and was ~2 degrees from theta Virgo. Comet Lulin was suppose to be around 6th mag. There are some streaks and other animate objects that are not interesting, only noise. Pictures taken at the Burke-Gaffney Observatory, February 18th ~12:30am local time.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• comet
• lulin
• bgo

[moonlitdog87]

The telescope tracking should make up for the apparent 15deg/hr, daily rotation of the nightsky, However in practice its hard to have perfect tracking, resulting in the camera drifting slightly relative to the fixed stars.

[Thundertronky]

just wondering...if you watch this video have you asked yourself what are those other stars moving up and down and side to side...??...

[moonlitdog87]

Hi there, the 'moving stars' are hot pixels on the ccd chip, for any digital camera a few pixels will always be stuck 'on'. These can be filtered out but I opt'd to keep the raw data. The camera sometimes drifted from the centered star;after correcting for this the dots appear to move and we also get the blinking star top/left. So the dots are always in the same spot on the camera, as seen when the blinking star coincides with the left-most position of the camera fov and those dots.

[throwachair]

diameter of a full moon? are you sure, that sounds rather large? 38 million miles away, that is some size nonetheless.

[Burlord1]

Okay right now--in 30minutes (if its night where you are)

go and find the big dipper A.k.A the saucepan.

find the handle and basically follow it down to a bright star (Regulas)

You will know it's regulas because if u go around regulas it is the point of a backwars question mark.

the comet will be the diameter of a full moon below regulas....

happy hunting

[bass1134]

well i observed with my binoculars and telescope for hours in the right spot and nothing. ill try again.

[Atubed]

It was below saturn in the evening of the 23rd. It was most visible on the night of 24th yesterday far east of saturn, unfortunatley skies were pretty rubbish around mine last night but i reckon i worked its exact position lol

[Daisycutt3r]

ffs

[bass1134]

what time was it supposed to be out???? i didn't find it. they said that tonight it was going to be near saturn, i found saturn with my telescope but never found lulin. = [

[pedrokitadani]

is moon ?

[Dudemansir12345]

Because stars rotate at 15 degrees per hour?