Viewing 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova

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Dan Chieppa
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Re: Viewing 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova

Unread post by Dan Chieppa »

Tonight would be a good time to try and locate Comet 45P in Hercules but guess what? It will cloud over and drop another 1-3 inches of snow by morning. You can always count on NE weather to mess with night sky opportunities. The comet is about mag 7 so you'll need binos or a small telescope if the weather didn't mess up the viewing.
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Apollo XX
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Re: Viewing 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova

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I got out last night and put a gargantuan effort into seeing comet 45P only to walk away with the prize for trying really hard. Armed with the latest info and maps from an S&T article written by Bob King http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observin ... ess-skies/ I strutted out to the street with my binos in hand and ready to conquer. The starfield was easy enough to navigate, and the charts I consulted even showed the comet sitting in a chair-like asterism of stars a little way above Beta Coma. Try as I may though, I couldn't claim to be seeing anything.

In and out of the house I strode, consulting charts and the latest info on the SkyLive website https://theskylive.com/planetarium?obj=45p Things were much harder than they should have been. The star patterns were very clear and I was 99.9% sure I was looking in exactly the right place, and the latest reports indicated that 45P was still hanging in there as a 10x50 binocular object, yet I couldn't pull it out of the sky. Back and forth I went, map and binos in hand and finding places to hide from the neighborhood lights, all to no avail.

Eventually I considered grabbing the 20x80s for a go at it handheld, then I reconsidered said to myself "just go get a scope". Surely that would resolve this. So out came a scope and back at it I went, carefully hopping my way through the stars to the area of interest. Nothing. More map consulting; maybe I wasn't scanning a wide enough area? Was I absolutely certain about the starfield? Did I have the date right? Was it perhaps the next day in universal time? On and on it went, in, out, put scope away, drag it back out.

Eventually I had to pack it in. All told the efforts had spanned a little over two hours and it was now past midnight. My goose was cooked and I had no comet to show for it. In the end I think I was done in by poor transparency in that part of the sky - I just never had a dark background no matter what I looked through. And 45P is fading. The SkyLive ephemeris has it between mag 10 and 11 now, and most visual reports have it nearing mag 9. I'll take another shot later during the week and break out the 12.5 if I have to. I really want to see this before it's gone.
"The purpose of life is the investigation of the Sun, the Moon, and the heavens." - Anaxagoras
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AndyG
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Re: Viewing 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova

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Mike, Too bad it did not work out, that's some dedication!
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Pete
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Re: Viewing 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova

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Thanks for sharing, Mike. It's as important to know what doesn't work as what does. And coming up empty is all part of the game. How many years have I been chasing Sirius B? Since 2000 perhaps?

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Re: Viewing 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova

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Got out again last night and finally saw 45P - I think. Again, the starfield is easy enough to navigate and getting in the general vicinity is a snap. The problem with working behind Leo in a dark sky with a good sized scope is that the place is rife with galaxies. I was looking through my old Meade 12.5" Starfinder, so plenty of them were showing up. I did find what I believe to be 45P, but also in the FOV were at least two other fuzzies. I attempted to apply the old tried and true method of looking for movement, but 45P is going pretty slowly (right now about .15* in an hour) and I'm pretty sure the brighter of the three fuzzies I had in the eyepiece did move some over the course of a couple of hours. There weren't a lot of stars to reference off of, so I was guessing at the shape of a triangulation pattern to judge movement. The true proof in the pudding will be when I go back there tomorrow night and see if what I was looking at is actually gone. If not it's back to the drawing board. One thing I'm sure of - 45P is visually quite dim. There is absolutely nothing in either 7x50 or 10x50 binoculars when trained on the area, and any fuzzy things in the eyepiece that I saw last night were magnitude 10 and dimmer.
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NGC7000
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Re: Viewing 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova

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Thanks for the update, Mike. Were you in the Leo Triplet region or over by the Virgo Cluster area ( M84 on up), or M95 area? I'm asking because I don't know of any other heavily galaxied areas and would like to know if there are any.

Tom
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Pete
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Re: Viewing 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova

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10.4 magnitude 45P Honda was supposedly sitting almost atop a bright galaxy when I tried for it from 21:30 - 21:40 last night. But there was no sign of the comet in my camera's relatively tight 21' X 15' FOV.

By way of contrast, P/Lovas (93P) was pretty nice at 14.6 magnitude and I'll be including a neat GIF to the upcoming observing report.

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Apollo XX
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Re: Viewing 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova

Unread post by Apollo XX »

NGC7000 wrote:Thanks for the update, Mike. Were you in the Leo Triplet region or over by the Virgo Cluster area ( M84 on up), or M95 area? I'm asking because I don't know of any other heavily galaxied areas and would like to know if there are any.

Tom
Hi Tom,

None of those, really. The areas you speak of are dense with the larger, more galaxy like galaxies. Last night the comet was in Coma and it's moving into UMa tonight for a four night stay, then it's off to Leo. The area where 45P is right now has a bunch of little NGC galaxies that may be small and dim but have enough surface brightness to look remarkably like a comet. Click this link for a view of the area; https://theskylive.com/planetarium?obj=45p

Also, here's the field from last night. It was real easy to run over a galaxy in my travels;

Image
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NGC7000
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Re: Viewing 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova

Unread post by NGC7000 »

Thank you, Mike. I am going to give this a shot next available opportunity.

Tom
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Apollo XX
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Re: Viewing 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova

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Well, I can finally say that I've definitively seen comet 45P-Honda. And I can also say that it was one of the most difficult observations I've made. As I had said in my last post in this thread, I needed to go back and see if what I saw on Monday evening had moved away. I did that last night, and I have to admit that I wasn't totally surprised that the three fuzzies I saw on Monday were right where I left them - nothing had changed, meaning no comet was seen. At the time I thought I should have been able to see movement and I had a few excuses for not seeing it, so yeah, they were all galaxies. Back to the drawing board.

Starting the search anew, again, I consulted my charts and began scouring the area. Once again, nothing. Try as I may there was nothing coming up as I panned a wider and wider search area from the designated points on the charts. At one point I suspected something, but it was so dim and diffuse that I let it go.

Eventually my son came home, and hearing the hair dryer that I was using to keep the dew at bay he came out to where I was set up and we went on a nice tour of some of the more showy objects in the sky. The sky was pretty good, and we probably spent the better part of an hour bopping around from object to object. The cold was starting to set in, so he headed for the house and I decided to take one more try at the comet.

And then I saw it. It was actually nearly dead-on position from the chart I had downloaded from Bob King's article on the Sky and Tel website. This thing is so dim and so diffuse that it took everything I had to discern it in the eyepiece of a 12.5" telescope. There was no head, just a big ol' coma, and averted vision didn't help even one bit. The coma was quite large though, and fortunately for this observation it was nestled right smack in the middle of a triangle of mag 12-13 stars. I knew that if I was in fact on it that I would see movement in a reasonable amount of time, so I set down to wait and drank a beer in the dark to my success.

Going back to the scope about 30 minutes later, I moved back to the area where I had seen the comet but struggled to get a handle on the starfield. At this point I had been going to the area so much over the past few days that I had the finder movements down tight. The patterns were very distinct and I knew exactly where I should be, but when I looked in the eyepiece something wasn't making sense. I should probably take better notes. It would help in cases like this. Eventually I found my way and sure enough, the fuzz-patch had moved out of the triangle! Success! 45P was mine, finally.

I was working with two charts, one from S&T and one from Stellarium. The one from S&T was dead-on;

Image

Image
"The purpose of life is the investigation of the Sun, the Moon, and the heavens." - Anaxagoras
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