Astroblog: Comet 186P Hergenrother and lots of teeny tiny galaxies

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Comet 186P Hergenrother and lots of teeny tiny galaxies

Comet 168P Hergenrother imaged with the T5 instrument of iTelescope on 12 October, 2012. 10 x 2 minute images were stacked with ImageJ, then SUMMED (click to embiggen).

Comet 168P Hergenrother is a rather nice little comet that surprised everyone by going into outburst. After reaching magnitude 9 (when it was supposed be be no brighter than magnitude 15), it has begun to fade.

However, it is still quite bright, around magnitude 10.

After missing out on imaging the comet (weather, asteroid 2012 TC4, other distract.. Ohhhh Shiny), I finally got a nice image of it. If you embiggen the image, you will see lots and lots of teeny tiny galaxies.

On the 14th and 15th 168P is in T5 distance of some nice galaxies, 14.7 magnitude UGC 12803 on the 14th and 12.2 magnitude NGC 7753 on the 15th. Well worth going after.

Here's an animation

Labels: comet, iTelescope