This picture was taken at 9:32 pm CDT at a rural Milan site using a Meade 8" telescope and an SBIG ST-6 CCD camera. This was a 15 second exposure. The size of the above photo is 28' x 18' (arc minutes). The altitude was only 3.7 degrees. The moon was 9 days old and shining brightly. The comet was seen briefly with binoculars at 9:20 pm and was photographed several times with the CCD from 9:23 to 9:42 pm. It set at 9:57 pm. Sunset was at 8:15 pm. The comet was a distance of 2.027 AU (187 million miles) from Earth and 1.205 AU (111 million miles) from the Sun. Click on full to see the entire 28' x 18' picture that was taken. In this full picture, based on the Hubble guide star CDROM catalog, the magnitude of the four stars below the comet range from 9.7 to 10.5.

David Renneke
dr@helios.augustana.edu

This page hosted by Get your own Free Web Page