Comet Lulin has been special for more reasons than one. It is a rare comet that has kept to the celestial "highway" - the ecliptic. It is distinctly green in color due its chemical composition of Cyanogen and a few other compounds of Carbon. It briefly showed an anti-tail and a disjointed tail as well. Due to the fact that it's motion in its orbit around the Sun is opposite the direction of Earth (and other planets), the relative motion with respect to the Earth was really quick. So quick that one could notice the shift in position against the starry back ground within a couple of hours even with naked eyes!
The comet was certainly bright and visible to the naked eye from the clear skies in the villages but impossible to spot from cities like Bangalore. In fact, I had difficulty locating it through binoculars from my extremely light polluted roof top ten days ago. A hint of tail was also visible from dark locations when seen through binoculars and even through my telescope in its 40' field.
Some of us have been trying to follow the comet and make photographic records of its path for the past one month and met with varied degrees of success. Myself and Dilip visited the farmhouse near Mysore over two successive weekends and managed to get some decent images. Of course, the fact that we don't have a proper drive system makes life that much more difficult but it also gives a lot of involvement in the entire process and excitement. (See my related post on astrophotography for some details on the equipment used along with a brief introduction to astrophotography.
The most exciting part of the whole exercise was, of course getting some decent images that could be made into a video clip. I have posted a couple of them in youtube, uploaded a few pictures in picasaweb and also posted them in my blog. The blog also details some of the details on how the photographs were taken along with some non-astro stuff as well.
The great thing about the pictures of this comet was, lot of our folks got excited about it and pitched in with help to create GIF images that can be shared easily. Anil and Ravi have spent quite a bit of their time in helping me in this. And of course, every one in the group were encouraging in their feedback. Let's hope that we, as a group will manage to take much better pictures in the days ahead.
It was of course a wonderful experience chasing this comet. Usually it is enough to know a comet's position on a day to day basis to be able to locate it but Lulin was different. You had to know its position on hourly basis! My 5" Meade was consistently missing the comet during the course of a single night's observing session since I was too lazy to keep updating the position so often. Of course, it would have been easy if I could update the orbital parameters into the hand controller but not having the required cable (Meade still insists on the archaic RS232 port on the computer to be used for this with RJ11 jack for the hand controller, don't know when they will upgrade to USB, probably after USB becomes archaic
)
Now the comet is getting fainter by the day. It was also lost in the glare of the moon for more than a week and now the clouds in Bangalore are threatening to make Lulin a forgotten chapter. Let's hope to get another exciting comet in the near future!
The comet was certainly bright and visible to the naked eye from the clear skies in the villages but impossible to spot from cities like Bangalore. In fact, I had difficulty locating it through binoculars from my extremely light polluted roof top ten days ago. A hint of tail was also visible from dark locations when seen through binoculars and even through my telescope in its 40' field.
Some of us have been trying to follow the comet and make photographic records of its path for the past one month and met with varied degrees of success. Myself and Dilip visited the farmhouse near Mysore over two successive weekends and managed to get some decent images. Of course, the fact that we don't have a proper drive system makes life that much more difficult but it also gives a lot of involvement in the entire process and excitement. (See my related post on astrophotography for some details on the equipment used along with a brief introduction to astrophotography.
The most exciting part of the whole exercise was, of course getting some decent images that could be made into a video clip. I have posted a couple of them in youtube, uploaded a few pictures in picasaweb and also posted them in my blog. The blog also details some of the details on how the photographs were taken along with some non-astro stuff as well.
The great thing about the pictures of this comet was, lot of our folks got excited about it and pitched in with help to create GIF images that can be shared easily. Anil and Ravi have spent quite a bit of their time in helping me in this. And of course, every one in the group were encouraging in their feedback. Let's hope that we, as a group will manage to take much better pictures in the days ahead.
It was of course a wonderful experience chasing this comet. Usually it is enough to know a comet's position on a day to day basis to be able to locate it but Lulin was different. You had to know its position on hourly basis! My 5" Meade was consistently missing the comet during the course of a single night's observing session since I was too lazy to keep updating the position so often. Of course, it would have been easy if I could update the orbital parameters into the hand controller but not having the required cable (Meade still insists on the archaic RS232 port on the computer to be used for this with RJ11 jack for the hand controller, don't know when they will upgrade to USB, probably after USB becomes archaic
)Now the comet is getting fainter by the day. It was also lost in the glare of the moon for more than a week and now the clouds in Bangalore are threatening to make Lulin a forgotten chapter. Let's hope to get another exciting comet in the near future!