COMET P/2008 A2 LINEAR

IAUC nr. 8912, published yesterday, announces the discovery of a newperiodic comet, P/2008 A2 by means of the LINEAR survey.

Preliminary orbital elements from the Minor Planet Center, report a short periodJupiter-family orbit, with P= 5.7 years, perihelion occuring on 2008,June 12 (q= 1.3 AU):

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iau/Ephemerides/Comets/2008A2.html

This comet is supposed to remain an unremarkable object, since itsmaximum brightness will be close to m1= 17.4, around the time of itsperihelion.We imaged this object on 2008, Jan. 15.4 and 16.4, while it was in the NEO-CP (details on image):

http://tinyurl.com/27mfar

In our stackings we didn't found any convincing evidence of a cometaryfeatures, probably because the extremely tiny coma reported by onlyone observer (J. Young, Table Mountain 0-61m reflector + CCD: 4"-6"diameter) was well below our threshold limit

Ernesto Guido and Giovanni Sostero