Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Comet C/2007 N3 (LULIN) Animation

Comet C/2007 N3 (LULIN) is moving closer to Earth. At closest approach (0.41 AU) on February 24th, the comet may be as bright as 4th magnitude becoming a naked eye object.

We imaged Comet Lulin on 16 January 2009 and on 17 January 2009 to show its motion on the background stars. Below you can see the animation composed of 2 stacks of 5X120 seconds each, taken remotely from Mayhill (NM) through a 0.10 f/5 reflector + CCD (click on it for a bigger version):



by Ernesto Guido & Giovanni Sostero

2 comments:

Onyourcase said...

In the animation, could I just ask what's the small feature moving around the lower half of this animation?

Team said...

If I've understood correctly what is the feature you are talking about, it's not a real object but probably a ccd defect.

Thanks for your comment

Ernesto