Vern’s Weblog

A little over a week ago (Oct 2, 2006) David Levy discovered his 22nd(?) comet visually in the constellation Leo. This is a remarkable lifetime achievement, especially now, with satellites and professional observatories performing automated searches. 

 I located the comet visually around 5:15 am this morning with a Nexstar 11 telescope.  The comet appeared quite faint, though the oval shaped coma was quite distinct. It appeared fairly uniform, a bright nucleus was not apparent.  I did not observe a tail. Others have reported that it has one that is 3 or 4 arc minutes long. Unfortunately, while I was setting up the Stellacam II, clouds were rapidly moving in from the northeast. The image below leaves a bit to be desired as it was shot through thin clouds and poor atmospheric turbulence.

Image was taken from Louisville, CO with Celestron Nexstar 11 telescope, Meade F3.3 focal reducer, and Astrovid Stellacam II video camera.  Camera was set to integrate 128 frames (about 4 seconds), medium gamma, and 9/14 gain. Fifteen images (1 minute) were aligned and stacked with ImagePlus for each of the two frames which are 5 minutes apart. Photoshop Elements 2 was used to crop and enhance the images and create the animation. The sky was partly cloudy, with obscurring thin clouds, temperature was 44°F, 37% humidity, 1-5 mph wind, and poor turbulence (4/10).  Polar alignment was off as degree or so as upward drift was noticable in the images.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 10:57 am and is filed under Astronomy, Comets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.