Hunting and Imaging Comets
Of all the objects visible in the night sky, it is the brightest comets that have most fascinated amateur astronomers and alarmed the human population. No other objects can stretch as far across the sky as the tail of a truly great comet, or be as easily
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Hunting and Imaging Comets
Martin Mobberley
Martin Mobberley Denmara Cross Green Cockfield Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk IP30 0LQ United Kingdom
ISSN 1431-9756 ISBN 978-1-4419-6904-0 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-6905-7 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-6905-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2010937433 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Preface
The death knell of the amateur comet discoverer has been prematurely sounded many times in the last few decades and yet, in the twenty-first century, a steady stream of comets found by amateur astronomers appears in the astronomical headlines. The qualities possessed by the visual observers of yore are still required, namely infinite patience and a love of the night sky, but the technology has changed as has the ability to take great images of the new discoveries. While remorseless robotic discovery machines scour the sky each night from cloud free sites, seemingly invincible, every fighter knows that every adversary has weaknesses that can be exploited. The machines cannot patrol in twilight and they do not look for fuzzy objects, but moving dots. In addition, even sites like New Mexico have cloudy nights and every professional observatory is dependent on endless funds to keep the facilities going and the machines maintained. Comets are unpredictable things too, which helps the amateur patroller. The hour after a CCD patrol has swept over a twentieth magnitude fuzzy star, it may choose to turn on and brighten by several magnitudes, placing it firmly within the amateur’s grasp; alternatively a comet might brighten with a few days of full Moon when the professional detection software cannot work and so the robotic patrols are idle. There are opportunities for the determined amateur everywhere. The current multi-million dollar blitz on the sky is largely as a result of US funding to detect NEOs in the inner solar system, but how long will that funding continue in these post credit-crunch times, especially if there is v
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Preface
confidence that almost every object more than a few hundred meters across has been found? Anyway, even if the NEO patrols do continue unabated there is no doubt that
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