Friday, September 5, 2008

Recovery of COMET P/2001 R1 = 2008 Q4 (LONEOS)

The Electronic Telegram No. 1490, published by the CBAT on September 1, announced that M. Jaeger (Stixendorf, Austria) recovered P/2001 R1 (LONEOS) on 2008, Aug. 31.08719. He described the object as having a small coma and a tail about 3' in PA 275 deg.

After reading a comment of Jaeger, posted in the newsgroup [Comets-ml] about his recovery of this comet, we performed some follow-up observations of this object, remotely from Pedara (Italy) through the "Skylive" 0.3-m, f/6 reflector + CCD. Co-adding of 14 unfiltered exposures, 120 seconds each, obtained on 2008 September 1.1, showed the presence of a small coma, nearly 10 arcsec in diameter, of about magnitude 16.8, and a tail nearly 40 arcsec long, toward PA 280 deg.

Our image is available here:

http://tinyurl.com/6zokce

G. Sostero, E. Guido, P. Camilleri and V. Gonano

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello and congratulations to all of you on this recovery. I was just reading and studying IAUC 8970 and MPEC 2008-R09 this morning and comparing the before and after positions using the old elements of P/2001 R1 and the new elements P/2008 Q4 in TheSky6 and see that this one was just half of my field of view away on my settup. So it gives me hope for future searches. I have tried for 85P several times and others with no success.

Whatever Michael is doing, its working!!!! And your followup observations I have been reading about are to be commended.

And thanks for your site and updates here. I read them and appreciate it.

Charles Bell
H47 Vicksburg

Juan Antonio HenrĂ­quez Santana said...

Congratulations,

A great work again!

Greetings,
Juan A. HenrĂ­quez

Team said...

Dears Charles ans Juan,
thanks for your kind comments!

They are really appreciated, in particular because they come from two very competent guys.
Cheers,

Giovanni, Ernesto, Paul and virgilio