A comet is discovered using just the Canon EOS 5D and a 100-mm lens

Yep, apparently you can just point your DSLR at the sky and discover a new comet. Who needs observatories?

Leonid Elenin has just posted this status on Facebook:

New comet discovered with Pentax 100-mm f/4 lens and a Canon EOS 5D - C/2013 E2 (IWAMOTO). Congrats to Masayuki Iwamoto!

JPL page
MPC page: www.minorplanetcenter.net...
More about the discoverer: en.wikipedia.org...

could you find an actual pic of this? i cant seem to.

That's an interesting little guy. I'm watching the Orbital Diagram at JPL and it just takes a gentle swing through the Solar System, just inside the Venus orbit for as close as it ever gets to the sun. Only a few observations to calculate from so far though. I wonder where that one came from and is headed?

I really wish they'd develop a way to tag some of these with sensors to let them do the driving for our seeing whats out there as they go wherever they go.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


No need to physically tag them, Bunny. If we know their trajectory, we know their speed, we can calculate their path infinitely, no?

reply to post by phantomjack

Oh, that's not what I meant. Not to track the ones that come close enough to tag. To USE them as free sensor platforms that, in just a few years at this rate, would be crisscrossing all over the Solar System. It'd give everyone here a near complete look around the whole thing at once if computing power could properly handle all the feeds and correlate them properly.

All for the cost of sensors that would survive the shot into whatever is passing us and acceleration up to it's speed, right? (Guessing on the main technical challenges by what seems logical). It'd save 100's of billions in what it would cost to make that many probes with their own propulsion to reach the speeds these are already going. Wouldn't it?

Like this one...going off, who knows quite where? Could be interesting data coming back from some of these. It's shallow arc just looked interesting in asking the where question.

Originally posted by Biigs
could you find an actual pic of this? i cant seem to.

An image and a time-lapse animation have been posted by Remanzacco observatory:



Time-lapse

remanzacco.blogspot.it...

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


Oh, sorry about that. I misunderstood.

Good idea though.

Originally posted by Wrabbit2000
I wonder where that one came from and is headed?

It came from the Oort cloud, and is headed that way too (probably never to return). The Solar System is huge, and the comet will spend hundreds of years just getting back to where it came from.