Possible discovery - Logged with BAA minor planets and comet sections

[NickH]

FTN was offline today due to adverse weather and a power cut on the island...hoping to get some imaging done on Thursday

[ash]

Only just seen this, excellent reading.

Congrats to you Nick:icon_salut:, on whatever the out come is, on the time and effort you have put into this and keeping us even smaller people informed.

Has there been any further developments?

Well done.

Andy

[NickH]

I have just got back from an imaging run in Spain...gigabytes of Solar to process, some lunar, Mercury, Venus and some deep sky... plus the comet split is elongating (had time on FTN whilst in Spain)...lots to catch up on...will post more soon

[NickH]

Here's the comet from the 4th April. The secondary is moving well away now... submitted these to the IAU. Have two more runs this week and a new target :-)

april4th.tif

[RichieJarvis]

Wow! A research paper - what will it actually be on Nick?

Can you two explain for the laymen amongst us (inc me) what rotational gradient processing is, and what these images actually show?

Cheers,

Richie

[NickH]

I haven't used RGRAD on this shot, it's just inverted and high pass filtered.

Rotational Gradient

Horses mouth is better to explain...

Research paper is on this comet and the split I hope

[ollypenrice]

Very VERY well done, Nick.

Olly

[NickH]

Am imaging again in 1 hour... if this one shows no new splitting or activity, I may ease up on the frequency as I have another target object in mind..

Was very nice to be on the Sky at Night on Monday with it though.. huge thank you to Pete, Chris and the production team for including it.

[NickH]

FTN weather issues and tech issues today, so imaged it with the TMB this evening...

10 x 120s stacks

[NickH]

Hot off the press: Just come off FTN...

It's gone (pretty much completely)

A fragment the size of a mountain has sublimated away in just under a week

Just some very faint hints left...15 x 60s using FTN

[NickH]

So...now have a start time/date for the eruption (approx 13th March 2010), courtesy of John Slinn's excellent images fromo IOW showing a brightening. Pic Du MIDI et al observations from that date also...then continual tracking for a month, by me, and several other observatories, leading to a mountain sized piece of this comet, sublimating away...or...possibly something else? Need to verify with PDM or another source...but this is fascinating

[NickH]

And with the secondary...goes the secondary tail... which kind of clinches it

[NickH]

Final submission to the IAU on this one...new target on Wednesday :-)

COD F65

CON N. Howes, Wiltshire, U.K.

OBS N. Howes

MEA N. Howes

TEL TEL 2-m reflector + CCD

ACK MPCReport file updated 2010.04.12 16:42:17

AC2

NET USNO-B1.0

CK07Q030 C2010 04 12.50434 15 16 06.65 +62 21 58.1 17.2 N F65

CK07Q030 C2010 04 12.50804 15 16 06.49 +62 22 00.0 17.2 N F65

CK07Q030 C2010 04 12.51198 15 16 06.32 +62 22 02.3 17.1 N F65

CK07Q030 C2010 04 12.51564 15 16 06.15 +62 22 04.0 17.2 N F65

CK07Q030 C2010 04 12.51564 15 16 06.17 +62 22 04.1 17.2 N F65

----- end -----

[Demonperformer]

Congratulations, Nick, on seeing this through to the end, despite the difficulties

[NickH]

I have to be honest, the support here has been so immense, that it's a credit to this forum...thank you everyone for hopefully enjoying this thread...and just remember to always have a look at your data... you never know what may be lurking..

[Tantalus]

Just want to say how much I've enjoyed reading this thread Nick, it's been compelling.

Congratulations...

[NickH]

Thanks again

New target this morning...Beam me up Scotti !

(mag 20...so this one is off the scale faint!)

[NickH]

She's back

An observatory posted images from the 17th and 18th showing the B fragment again, so I re-ran some processing (vastly mroe agressive) on earlier images I had taken where the b was not showing. With a stack of 15 images and very heavy DDP and HPF filtering, it's there... way fainter, but there