Leeds Astronomical Society LAS Meetings Observing Membership

 

 

Comets (& Asteroids)

Scroll & select a comet from the previews below to display the respective image(s).

  • C2023/E1 (Atlas)
    C2022/E3 (ZTF)
  • C2022/E3 (ZTF)
    C2022/E3 (ZTF)
  • C2020/F3 (Neowise)
    C2020/F3 (Neowise)
  • C2019/Y4 (Atlas)
    C2019/Y4 (Atlas)
  • Comet 17P (Holmes)
    Comet 17P (Holmes)
  • C/2006 M4 (Swan)
    C/2006 M4 (Swan)
  • C/2006 A1 (Pojanski)
    C/2006 A1 (Pojanski)
  • Comet 9P/Tempel 1
    Comet 9P/Tempel 1
  • C/2004 Q2 (Machholz)
    C/2004 Q2 (Machholz)
  • C/2004 Q1 (Tucker)
    C/2004 Q1 (Tucker)
  • Comet 78P (Gehrels)
    Comet 78P (Gehrels)
  • C/2003 K4 (Linear)
    C/2003 K4 (Linear)
  • C/2003 T4 (Linear)
    C/2003 T4 (Linear)
  • C/2002 T7 (Linear)
    C/2002 T7 (Linear)
  • C/2001 Q4 (Neat)
    C/2001 Q4 (Neat)
  • Asteroids Psyche & Parthenope
    Asteroids
  • Asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1
    (7482) 1994 PC1

C2022/E3 (ZTF)

(James Clark)
(James Clark - single frame with meteor)
(James Clark - single frame with meteor - inverted colour)
(Ivor Trueman - Cookridge 4th Feb 2023)

C2022/E3 (ZTF)

This Long-period comet was discovered in March 2022 by astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in California.

It came within 1.11 AU's from the Sun on 12th Jan 2023 and 0.28 AU's from the Earth on 1st Feb 2023.

James Clark's second (& third) image above is a single 2 min. exposure where a small meteor can also be seen. For higher resolution versions, and acquisition details see James' astrobin page.

Below is a short video from Ivor Trueman that compresses 2 hours 23 minutes of unprocessed data, into 15 seconds.


For more info. on the comet see the Wikipedia.

 

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Astronomical Units

The Astronomical Unit, or AU was originally defined as the average distance from the Earth to the Sun when at the closest and farthest points apart (called the aphelion and perihelion respectively). i.e. 1 × AU is about 150 million km (93 million miles) or about 8 light-minutes.

In 2012 the AU was defined to be exactly 149,597,870.7 km.

Measuring distances in Astronomical Units, provides a reasonable 'yardstick' for measuring distances on the scale of the Solar system, which would otherwise become unwieldy if they had to be represented in km or miles.

Stellarparallax parsec1

For the even larger distances outside of the Solar System, the Astronical Unit forms the basis of another distance measurement the parsec.

A parsec is defined as the distance which one AU subtends an angle of one arcsecond (1/3600th of a degree), and is equivalent to approx. 206,264.8 AU's or 3.262 light-years.

i.e. if when the Earth moves through a distance of 1 AU, a star appears to move by 1/3600th of a degree when compared to background stars, then the disance to the star is 1 parsec.

For example our closest major galaxy, Andromeda is 778,000 parsecs away, or approx. 160 billion AU (or 2.537 million light-years).

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