New Comet: C/2012 S1 (ISON)

Originally posted by Mogget
I don't see any evidence that the comet has a hyperbolic orbit. The elements in the JPL Small Bodies database show an eccentricity very slightly greater than 1.0, but you have to remember that this orbit has been calculated based on the Sun as the centre of mass. The eccentricity will almost certainly be slightly less than 1.0 with respect to the Solar System barycentre......unless the comet is gravitationally perturbed by one of the giant planets.

You can use Ephemeris feature at the JPL database to calculate orbital elements (including eccentricity) based on the Solar System barycenter. This of course will also be refined with time, but it does include perturbations.

ssd.jpl.nasa.gov...

The setup screen should look like this:

Ephemeris Type [change] : ELEMENTS
Target Body [change] : Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON)
Center [change] : Solar System Barycenter (SSB) [500@0]
Time Span [change] : Start=2012-09-25, Stop=2013-12-25, Step=1 d
Table Settings [change] : defaults
Display/Output [change] : default (formatted HTML)

Finally I will get to photograph a comet! My skills were not up to the task for the last couple but they are now! I can't wait!

cool thread, though i think we should probably focus on the heavy mass objects and comets coming in 2012 first. weird timing this is released when tomorrow has been pinpointed as a date by many people for 'something' to happen. peace.

OOHHH! I get to make a conspiracy theory about this:

Ison is a drone note, or a slow-moving lower vocal part, used in Byzantine chant, which comes from the Byzantine Empire, which was the Roman Empire of late antiquity. When this comet passes it will send a signal to the Illuminati, who will release their reptoid pets which will attack the Greys who were giving Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nuclear weapons. This will of course trigger HAARP which will activate, downing all the Chemtrail spraying airplanes sending them crashing into all the organic farms causing Monsanto to finally realize their dream of GMO food for all. The President will take cover in the DUMB under Denver International Airport, and when Occupy and Anonymous search the White House they will discover a free energy device that has been left unguarded by Big Oil. They will use this free energy device to power the Air Force's secret space planes and fly to the dark side of the moon where they will destroy the nefarious headquarters of Big Pharma. They will then fly to the sun (avoiding Nibiru of course)and check out all of the motherships that are orbiting it and stealthily sneak onboard to find the plans for Earth takeover by Bigfoot, Nessie (sleeper agents) and when they log onto the computer the first thing that comes up will be this.

Did I get everything?

reply to post by superman2012


Yes! Even the picture you linked to has mysteriously disappeared. It's a conspiracy!

P.S. This is how the comet may look next year: twitpic.com...

reply to post by GameKeeper


Nothing expected this year. But there's a good chance comet C/2011 L4 PANSTARRS will be a naked eye object next March

Early next year, a comet will come fairly close to Earth and the Sun—traveling within the orbit of Mercury—and it has the potential to be visible to the naked eye. Amateur and professional astronomers alike have been keeping watch on Comet C/2011 L4 PANSTARRS (or PANSTARRS for short), trying to ascertain just how bright this comet may become. It will come within 45 million kilometers (28 million miles) of the Sun on March 9, 2013, which is close enough for quite a bit of cometary ice to vaporize and form a bright coma and tail. Ads by Google Intel® Cloud Computing - Making the Cloud work for you with open, multi-vendor Cloud solutions! - www.Intel.co.uk/CloudComputing But just how bright, no one can say for sure. Comets have been known to be very unpredictable (remember the breakup of Comet Elenin?) but some estimates have said this comet could become a naked-eye object, as bright as Vega or Arcturus next March.

phys.org...

Looking forward to photographing a comet again! But atm ISON looks like being the bees knees

Anyone know the orbital period of the comet, or can it be calculated from the current data?

It must be longer than records on comets as it is/was unknown until just now?

reply to post by abeverage


Likewise. I just need to take a refresher course on how to polar align my EQ mount - it's been a while since I used it!


On another (related) note...

Here's a "Rough and ready position chart of comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) from UK latitudes, late Nov 2013 - subject to change" from Pete Lawrence.


Click here for the source and a full size version.

reply to post by FireballStorm


We have had near zero visablity due to fires this year so until it clears up or I am able to go somewhere dark it wont matter lol

Originally posted by GameKeeper
cool thread, though i think we should probably focus on the heavy mass objects and comets coming in 2012 first.

There are none (with regard to "HMO's").

reply to post by FireballStorm


Sounds like we're going to need a thread dedicated to ATS members' photos of it! I can't wait to start imaging it. I think I might start soon and just continuously image it whenever its visible in order to produce a kind of timelapse of its evolution as a comet.

reply to post by abeverage


Sorry to hear that abeverage

Hope it gets better for you over there soon.


I also have the same problem with the lack of dark where I am now (the Midlands), but I'm midway through the process of moving to somewhere where I will have regular access to relatively dark skies. Just at the right time too it seems

I can't wait to get out of here


Another update has just come my way...

It looks like this comet has the right orbital characteristics needed to produce a meteor shower here on Earth. Of course, that may change when the orbit is refined, but I think this is great news. It's certainly made my day (again!)

The orbital elements of this new comet can to do a meteor shower,
this it's not sure, too for non definitive orbital data,
the actual data give the following meteor shower:

maximum 15,9 January (solar longitude 295°)

geocentric speed 50,9 km/s

radiant around 152,4°, +16,4° (10 H 10 M, + 16,4°), very near to the star
Eta Leonis.

The radiant should be very well visible from Northern emisphere from 22.00
local time for 45° North

Naturally each future change in orbital elements shall change
the data of the shower as too its existence or not.
Best greetings.
Roberto Gorelli

Source: METEOROBS (The Meteor Observing mailing list)

reply to post by ngchunter


I think you're right ngchunter. I'll be looking forward to seeing some images from yourself and other ATS members

To track the comet in Stellarium copy this and paste it to the end of the Stellarium ini file
(Program Files / Stellarium / data / ssystem.ini)

You will find it listed as C/2012 s1 (ISON) in the search window. Update the Orb Els as available.


[ISON]
name = C/2012 s1 (ISON)
parent = Sun
radius = 80
oblateness = 0.0
halo = true
color = 1.0,1.0,1.0
tex_halo = star16x16.png
tex_map = nomap.png
coord_func = comet_orbit
orbit_TimeAtPericenter = 2456625.369621431330
orbit_PericenterDistance = .01250446176504045
orbit_Eccentricity = 1.000000000000218
orbit_ArgOfPericenter = 345.50712732
orbit_AscendingNode = 295.7451926842039
orbit_Inclination = 61.81287790235313
lighting = false
albedo = 1
orbit_visualization_period = 365.25

Thanks for that Phage


I'm sure others have noticed this on Spaceweather.com, but I thought it was worth posting here before it's consigned to the archive.

Much about this comet--and its ultimate fate--remains unknown. "At this stage we're just throwing darts at the board," says Karl Battams of the NASA-supported Sungrazer Comet Project, who lays out two possibilities:

"In the best case, the comet is big, bright, and skirts the sun next November. It would be extremely bright -- negative magnitudes maybe -- and naked-eye visible for observers in the Northern Hemisphere for at least a couple of months."

"Alternately, comets can and often do fizzle out! Comet Elenin springs to mind as a recent example, but there are more famous examples of comets that got the astronomy community seriously worked up, only to fizzle. This is quite possibly a 'new' comet coming in from the Oort cloud, meaning this could be its first-ever encounter with the Sun. If so, with all those icy volatiles intact and never having been truly stressed (thermally and gravitationally), the comet could well disrupt and dissipate weeks or months before reaching the sun."

"Either of the above scenarios is possible, as is anything in between," Battams says. "There's no doubt that Comet ISON will be closely watched. Because the comet is so far away, however, our knowledge probably won't develop much for at least a few more months."

Meanwhile, noted comet researcher John Bortle has pointed out a curious similarity between the orbit of Comet ISON and that of the Great Comet of 1680. "Purely as speculation," he says, "perhaps the two bodies could have been one a few revolutions ago."

I find that last part especially interesting.

Great Comet of 1680

C/1680 V1, also called the Great Comet of 1680, Kirch's Comet, and Newton's Comet, has the distinction of being the first comet discovered by telescope. Discovered by Gottfried Kirch on 14 November 1680, New Style, it became one of the brightest comets of the 17th century – reputedly visible even in daytime – and was noted for its spectacularly long tail.[4] Passing only 0.42 AUs from Earth on 30 November,[5] it sped around an incredibly close perihelion of 0.0062 AU (930,000 km; 580,000 mi) on 18 December 1680, reaching its peak brightness on 29 December as it rushed outward again.[2][5] It was last observed on 19 March 1681.[1] As of September 2012 the comet was about 253 AU from the Sun.[6]

Source: Wikipedia

To me, that sounds like a very similar scenario to what we have here, not surprisingly since they have similar orbits.



The Great Comet of 1680 over Rotterdam

So assuming that ISON is a piece of C/1680 V1, and similar sized or bigger, then I suppose that suggests we could be in for a repeat of the display in 1680.

Would that be fair to say?


Edit to add some descriptions of the Great Comet of 1680:

And here is what the residents of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island observed!

Excerpt from The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America , by John Fiske, 1903 Edition, Vol II, at page 59

Late in the autumn of 1680 the good people of Manhattan were overcome with terror at a sight in the heavens such as has seldom greeted human eyes. An enormous comet, perhaps the most magnificent one on record, suddenly made its appearance. At first it was tailless and dim, like a nebulous cloud, but at the end of a week the tail began to show itself and in a second week had attained a length of 30 degrees; in the third week it extended to 70 degrees, while the whole mass was growing brighter. After five weeks it seemed to be absorbed into the intense glare of the sun, but in four days more it reappeared like a blazing sun itself in the throes of some giant convulsion and threw out a tail in the opposite direction as far as the whole distance between the sun and the earth. Sir Isaac Newton, who was then at work upon the mighty problems soon to be published to the world in his "Principia," welcomed this strange visitor as affording him a beautiful instance for testing the truth of his new theory of gravitation. But most people throughout the civilized world, the learned as well as the multitude, feared that the end of all things was at hand. Every church in Europe, from the grandest cathedral to the humblest chapel, resounded with supplications, and in the province of New York a day of fasting and humiliation was appointed, in order that the wrath of God might be assuaged. Let us take a brief survey of the little city on Manhattan Island, upon which Newton's comet looked down, while Dominie Nieuwenhuysen and Dominie Frazius were busy with prayers to avert the direful omen.

Source: THE GREAT COMET OF 1680

Could this be the one?

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Of course historically aren't comets supposed to herald something bad?

reply to post by Phage


I did that for Stellarium, but it doesn't work.
I'm using KML file for Google Earth now. scully.cfa.harvard.edu...

Originally posted by FireballStorm
reply to post by abeverage

 

Sorry to hear that abeverage

Hope it gets better for you over there soon.


I also have the same problem with the lack of dark where I am now (the Midlands), but I'm midway through the process of moving to somewhere where I will have regular access to relatively dark skies. Just at the right time too it seems

I can't wait to get out of here

Another update has just come my way...

It looks like this comet has the right orbital characteristics needed to produce a meteor shower here on Earth. Of course, that may change when the orbit is refined, but I think this is great news. It's certainly made my day (again!)

The orbital elements of this new comet can to do a meteor shower,
this it's not sure, too for non definitive orbital data,
the actual data give the following meteor shower:

maximum 15,9 January (solar longitude 295°)

geocentric speed 50,9 km/s

radiant around 152,4°, +16,4° (10 H 10 M, + 16,4°), very near to the star
Eta Leonis.

The radiant should be very well visible from Northern emisphere from 22.00
local time for 45° North

Naturally each future change in orbital elements shall change
the data of the shower as too its existence or not.
Best greetings.
Roberto Gorelli

Source: METEOROBS (The Meteor Observing mailing list)

Thanks it has been a bad year for fires...

So my conspiracy side says YAY NIGHT OF THE COMET! When I hear it will pass close enough for a meteor shower...

reply to post by FireballStorm


Thanks for the heads up. I bet there will be tons of telescopes sold between now and then. We had a house fire last year so we lost our silly little kids telescope, guess this is the incentive to start looking to replace it.

reply to post by FireballStorm


So Comet Hale Bopp wasn't a good enough show? As I recall, it has been the only major naked eye comet view in my lifetime so far.