Astroblog: Comet C/2012 K5 arrives in Australian Skies

Thursday, January 03, 2013

Comet C/2012 K5 arrives in Australian Skies

Location of C/2012 K5 (LINEAR) looking north as seen from Adelaide at 23:00 local daylight saving time, similar views will be seen elsewhere in Australia at an equivalent local time (click to embiggen).

Comet C/2012 K5 is a nice little midrange comet that has been delighting northern viewers. It as now enterd the Southern hemisphere skies, to the north.

The comet is currently around magnitude 9, so you will need really good binoculars, or at least a small telescope, and dark sky to see it.

The comet passes close to some very nice territory, so a wide aperture lens will make for very nice viewing. Tonight the comet is close to the M36 open cluster. It then passes close to the Asteroid Ceres and a number of interesting open clusters. The comet fades reasonably rapidly, but is easily visible in most amateur telescopes for most of January.

Spotters map for C/2012 K5 suitable for printing, the comet is a magnitude brighter than plotted on this chart. The circle is the field of view of 10x50 binoculars, click to embiggen, use the location map above to orient the spotters map.

Labels: binocular, comet, telescope

# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 4:29 pm

Comments:

Hi Ian,

I want to thank you for posting about Comet C/2012 K5 Linear recently.

Thanks to your informative article, I was able to image it with my Polarie mounted camera on Saturday evening, from SW Sydney.

Link here if you are interested: http://roger.blogs.exetel.com.au/index.php?/archives/287-Astro-Photography-Without-a-Telescope-11.html

Regards

Roger Powell

# posted by

Ggreybeard : 4:14 pm

G'Day Roger

Excellent result! I'll HTMLise the link for other folks http://roger.blogs.exetel.com.au/index.php?/archives/287-Astro-Photography-Without-a-Telescope-11.html

Glad I could point yo in the right direction, Clear Skies!

# posted by

Ian Musgrave : 10:33 pm

This comment has been removed by the author.

# posted by

Unknown : 2:37 am

This comment has been removed by the author.

# posted by

Unknown : 2:40 am

Hi Ian, and thank you for your excellent tracking maps! Just trying to find the comet in a picture I took on the 12 January. Could you please spesify at what time (UTC please..) the datemarks are?

Best regards, OJ Nordhagen, Sola (the sun!), Norway

# posted by

Unknown : 2:41 am

G'Day Ole, the marks are for 23:00 ACDST, which is UTC +10:30

# posted by

Ian Musgrave : 10:27 pm

Thanks Ian, and sorry for multiple postings. (It is not clear that a post has been accepted for moderation, and if a space is needed between the number and the word in the anti-robot code below) Cheers from the other side of Earth, OJ

# posted by

Unknown : 10:55 pm