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Solar System 2: comets, meteors & minor planets

 

 Comets

Here are links to pages for comets I have observed.

 Periodic comets, in numerical order

Dates of recent or approaching perihelion are given for current comets.

 Other comets, in reverse order of discovery

Beware of artefacts, even with high quality optics: When is a comet not a comet?

   

 Meteors, fireballs, etc

Links to pages of meteor photos I have taken.

 

 2012 Jan 22 - A fireball?

While the camera was busy on the V900 Mon photo I sat on the pair of steps I use by the telescope, idly counting exposure clicks and looking eastwards towards the newly risen Leo. I saw what I suppose must have been a fireball. It was not spectacular but it was certainly unlike anything I have ever seen before.

My impression was of a lump of coal. It glowed with a saturated orange colour. Not dazzling but fairly bright. It had an appreciable size - I guess about half the diameter of the Moon, so about 1/4° across. It seemed to have a black outline but I suspect that was probably an illusion. It had a trail of white smoke which rapidly wiggled and dispersed (there was some breeze).

The object moved horizontally as far as I could judge in the 3 seconds or so for which I could see it. It headed southwards following a line roughly from ξ UMa to ζ Leo. My field of view was restricted by my dome aperture so that is as far as I could see it.

I guess it could not have been more than a few hundred metres from me. There was no sound but the waviness of the smoky tail gave me that impression. So something may have fallen to earth on the open hillside to the south of me.

 

 Minor planets

Asteroids are those minor planets which orbit in amongst the major planets. Most of the asteroids lie in a belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter but there are several other categories.

A quite separate group of minor planets are the remote planets, lying outside Neptune's orbit. It was discovered towards the end of the 20th century that Pluto was not alone out there and now several remote planets are known, some larger than Pluto. Pluto has therefore been demoted to a minor planet and because that happened fairly recently it now has the ignominiously high minor planet number of 134340.

Here are links to pages for minor planets I have observed.

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