RASC - St. John's Centre
Members Photos

"Comet 252P Linear" taken April 11, 2016 at Mount Pearl, Newfoundland. Equipment - Comets often "under perform" - they turn out to be less bright than predicted (sometimes significantly so). However 252P was different for this year's visit - as evident in the Magnitude Graph (grey line is prediction). Notice the jump in magnitude around beginning of March 2016. In fact it reached naked eye brightness. 252P is a short-period comet (approximately 5 years) and is in the relatively rare Earth-Jupiter family of comets. It is believed that Panstarrs BA14 is a smaller break-off of 252P and follows closely behind it. During this visit these comets passed within 14 and 9 lunar distances respectively - one of the closest comet encounters in a couple hundred years. More information on these and other comets (including Magnitude charts) here: http://www.aerith.net/comet/weekly/current.html

Equipment - C11 on EQ8, Canon 6D (modified) and LPS-P2 filter. Autoguided using Stellarvue 90 APO, QHY5LII-mono and PHD2. Images captured with assistance of BackYardEOS, stacked and processed in PixInsight. Stack of 12, 90-second subs @ 3200iso (18 minutes total integration time).

Click on image for full original photo.

"Comet 252P Linear" brightness chart.