Fact is Mr Francis Walsh has blown this topic wide open again.

Michael Mattiazzo took a picture of comet elenin yesterday which we looked at today. The picture shows further proof that comet Elenin has broken up into pieces as a result of the effect of the sun’s gravity and heat on it.

Comet Elenin should almost be a 6th magnitude comet at this stage, meaning that it should be almost visible to the naked eye. Instead however, Elenin is now reported to be a 10th magnitude comet which is now a faint smudge in the sky using telescopes.

Radio astronomers have also reported that the radio signals they bounced off the comet show that elenin has no water which indicates a comet breakup.

We processed the picture taken by Michael Mattiazzo to remove some of the background noise but as you can see there is very little left of comet elenin. The comet is in the lower center of the picture. We expect that there will be nothing to see of the comet after the next week or two.

We have been getting a lot of emails from people telling us that comet elenin has not broken up because they have seen recent pictures of it.

Unfortunately we cannot keep on answering the same question again and again to convince people that the comet has indeed broken up.

Instead we would like to refer people to Leonid Elenin’s new post on his blog where he talks more about how the comet is breaking up and the opportunity it gives us to study the comet.

Note in his post where he states the following:

On images from Sept. 1st in the comet’s coma there was no condensation visible, and that meant the comet had already broken up into fairly small pieces, with a maximum size of not more than a hundred meters.

Such a breakup of small comets passing near the Sun is not rare, and in that is nothing surprising. I note that this is a breakup, not an explosion. All the pieces continue to move on the comet’s trajectory. The large fragments are likely to continue to disintegrate into smaller ones. It is possible that in October when the comet moves into the morning sky, we will no longer be able to see what once was Comet Elenin.

This is exactly what we are seeing in recent pictures.

spaceobs.org...

L. Elenin
As many readers already know, Comet Elenin has begun the irreversible process of breaking up. We spoke earlier about the probablility of such an outcome, but I considered it less than 50%. On the graph at left you can see a selection of ten comets that approach the Sun closer than 0.5 a.u. The red line shows the boundary, to the left of which, derived from J. Bortle’s formula, is the safe zone, but to the right is the zone of disintegration. The yellow color shows Comet Elenin, with absolute magnitude obtained by visual observations, and the blue is from JPL-NASA data. As we see, Bortle’s formula, all-in-all, doesn’t work too badly. Although there is a bright exception – the green triangle belongs to the unique comet 96P/Machholtz, about which I will speak next time.

Now it is absolutely clear that the comet’s drop in brightness, first noted by Michael Mattiazzo on Aug. 20th, was not coincidental – the decay process had already begun, and over the course of the next several days the comet changed greatly. Its pseudo-nucleus became diffuse and extended, and later vanished completely. On images from Sept. 1st in the comet’s coma there was no condensation visible, and that meant the comet had already broken up into fairly small pieces, with a maximum size of not more than a hundred meters.

Such a breakup of small comets passing near the Sun is not rare, and in that is nothing surprising. I note that this is a breakup, not an explosion. All the pieces continue to move on the comet’s trajectory. The large fragments are likely to continue to disintegrate into smaller ones. It is possible that in October when the comet moves into the morning sky, we will no longer be able to see what once was Comet Elenin. It is possible that something will be visible to large earth-based telescopes. The breakup of a long-period comet fairly close to the Earth (on a Solar System scale) is a rather rare event. During such a breakup we can see the interior of the comet to better understand its construction and composition.

Overall, the most scientifically interesting thing is the breakup scenario, but unfortunately right now the comet is not visible to the largest telescopes or even the Hubble Space Telescope because of its close angular distance from the Sun (small elongation). On the other hand, amateur astronomers, awaiting this comet which might have been visible to the unaided eye, will now not see it, at least visually in their telescopes and binoculars.

We will wait for Sept. 23rd when the comet is due to appear in the field of view of the SOHO space coronagraph. Any result will tell us what we can expect at the beginning of October when the comet once again should appear in the pre-dawn sky. We will wait. The end of this story is near…

Light pollution, and plenty of it.

Observatory codes: D87 Brooklyn Park, D82 Wallaroo, 427 Stockport

Oh, and I apologize for not having photo's of Mr Mattiazzo as to be able to judge him by how he looks. I'm glad you've given people evidence of the measure in which you deem people credible.

THAT IS NOT HIS VIEWING LOCATION

It seems that the favourite method of attack is ridicule, a crash course in history will confirm that this is normal human behaviour.

Aug. 23.39, 8.9, 3' (M. Mattiazzo, Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia, 25x100 binoculars);
22.39, 8.8, 3' (M. Mattiazzo, Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia, 25x100 binoculars);
21.37, 8.1, 5' (D. A. J. Seargent, Cowra, NSW, Australia, 25x100 binoculars);
21.31, 8.6, 4' (S. T. Rae, Hamilton, New Zealand, 9x63 binoculars);
20.31, 8.3, 5' (S. T. Rae, Hamilton, New Zealand, 9x63 binoculars);
19.39, 8.1, 4' (M. Mattiazzo, Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia, 25x100 binoculars; zodiacal light);
19.36, 8.4, 4' (D. A. J. Seargent, Cowra, NSW, Australia, 25x100 binoculars);
18.30, 8.3, 4' (S. T. Rae, Hamilton, New Zealand, 9x63 binoculars);
17.39, 8.2, 4' (M. Mattiazzo, Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia, 25x100 binoculars; zodiacal light);
16.94, 8.9, 4' (M. Goiato, Aracatuba, Brazil, 20x100 binoculars);
16.91, 8.3, 4' (A. Amorim, Florianopolis, Brazil, 0.18-m reflector);
16.91, 8.3, 3' (W. Souza, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 20x80 binoculars);
16.38, 8.4, 5' (D. A. J. Seargent, Cowra, NSW, Australia, 25x100 binoculars);
13.90, 8.3, -- (A. Amorim, Florianopolis, Brazil, 0.18-m reflector; moonlight);
12.90, 8.4, 3' (A. Amorim, Florianopolis, Brazil, 0.18-m reflector; moonlight);
7.91, 8.8, 3' (A. Amorim, Florianopolis, Brazil, 0.18-m reflector; moonlight, light pollution);
7.39, 9.0, 3' (M. Mattiazzo, Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia, 25x100 binoculars; moonlight);