JULY 16TH - COMET C/2017 K2 PANSTARRS

[paulastro]

I went out at 11.00pm with the Celestron Starsense 8 inch dob and observed a few deep sky objects and waited to after midnight to look for the comet as the sky should have been darker by then.This turned out to be a mistake.

By midnight there was quite a bit of thin patchy  cloud and the wanning gibbous moon was low in the SE.  I quickly got onto M10 using Starsense which  looked noticeably lacklustre using my ES 24/68 eyepiece in the poor conditions.

I knew the comet was within a degree of M10, but there was no sign of it after several minutes of searching around M10 - I wasn't aware of exactly where it was supposed to be.

I changed to my Morpheus 17.5, which gave a field if just over a degree, so the comet should still be in the field as M10.  After a few mts I thought I could see where it might be, it looked dull compared with M10, a rather diffuse small spherical shape which kept coming in and out of vision.  I did a quick sketch of where I thought it was, as I wasn't at all sure it was really the comet.

As soon as I came indoors I checked my sketch against the SkySafari field and was delighted to see it was exactly where I thought I had seen it, relative to a triangle of stars and M10.

Not a spectacular view, but I was very pleased to have seen the comet in the same field as M10.

 

 

[Astro_Dad]

Very good result Paul. I made an attempt using the StarSense on Friday night/Sat morning but despite a reasonably thorough search couldn’t pick out. M10 was quite faint and washed out too. 

[paulastro]

Thanks Andrew, it was a shame we both had milky skies and moonlight.  If we had dark transparent nights it would have been a lot more impressive.