New Comet: C/2014 E2 (JACQUES)

C. Jacques, E. Pimentel and J. Barros have discovered a new and "very bright" comet from an observatory near Oliveira, Brazil. This new comet has been designated C/2014 E2 (JACQUES). No word yet on it's trajectory or if/when it's going to put on a show for us. The fact that they emphasized "very bright," leaves me hopeful that this comet could be the "comet of the century" that ISON was supposed to be.


remanzacco.blogspot.com...

Ooooh......Great new doom porn. I'm getting a little tired of economic porn.

rickymouse
Ooooh..

....Great new doom porn. I'm getting a little tired of economic porn.

Yeah the doom porn crowd will be coming out of the woodwork when they hear about a new comet. Like old faithful.

My heart belonged to Ison. I will not trust this "new" comet to amaze and enthrall me the way Ison promised (and failed) to do.

S&F... One of these days one will give us a good show.

Never fear, the end is near!

There! Another customer coming to bring us change for a bad experience!


Seriously... I do find it interesting how the Governments are suddenly in a heightened state of alert for flying things in space. Hopefully it's just a 'better late than never' catch up to what really should have been done all this time....but I can't help but wonder too. I'll be interested in seeing where this little guy is off to in such a hurry.

Now that's a Cheesy post if i ever saw one...

thanks for the heads up!
S&F

Awesome I never got a chance to view ISON .. Last comet I saw was Hal Bopp. Perhaps someone needs to message cheesey let him know about this I remember his addiction to ISON provided many updates for us

Here's some info on the orbit. It's not going to be a spectacular naked eye comet. "Very bright" meaning magnitude 11, which is still far too dim to see by eye, but to a telescope it's an easy target. It's a southern hemisphere comet which is probably why it wasn't discovered until now, normally comets are found by at least magnitude 14-15 or so; this is what you get when you stop funding for the Siding Spring Survey. Who knows what near earth asteroids are being missed in the southern hemisphere as a result.

www.itelescope.net...

Even though it's a southern hemisphere comet, one of the perks of living in Florida is that much of the southern celestial sphere is available to us. I plan to photograph this comet this weekend if the weather holds.

reply to post by ngchunter


Awesome! Thanks for the info.

What telescope, camera and settings do you use for taking your celestial images?

Wrabbit2000
Never fear, the end is near!

There! Another customer coming to bring us change for a bad experience!


Seriously... I do find it interesting how the Governments are suddenly in a heightened state of alert for flying things in space. Hopefully it's just a 'better late than never' catch up to what really should have been done all this time....but I can't help but wonder too. I'll be interested in seeing where this little guy is off to in such a hurry.

They need to keep an eye on the things that fly for a long time so they can find out how to keep the jets from falling into the ocean. Seems that the government should hire astronomers to track aircraft.

I can see the list of threads now.
In hoax and skunkworks and of course the dreams and predictions forum. Menendes567 here's another shot at fame for you.

ngchunter
Here's some info on the orbit. It's not going to be a spectacular naked eye comet. "Very bright" meaning magnitude 11, which is still far too dim to see by eye, but to a telescope it's an easy target. It's a southern hemisphere comet which is probably why it wasn't discovered until now, normally comets are found by at least magnitude 14-15 or so; this is what you get when you stop funding for the Siding Spring Survey. Who knows what near earth asteroids are being missed in the southern hemisphere as a result.

www.itelescope.net...

Even though it's a southern hemisphere comet, one of the perks of living in Florida is that much of the southern celestial sphere is available to us. I plan to photograph this comet this weekend if the weather holds.

Let me know what you get ngchunter I always love to see your work! And after the disappointment of ISON and never getting to get a clear day to get a decent shot I am sad...

LOL

Phantasm
reply to post by ngchunter

 

Awesome! Thanks for the info.

What telescope, camera and settings do you use for taking your celestial images?

I use an 8" LX200 Classic. I recently acquired a used SBIG ST-7 camera. It's an old parallel port CCD, but it's still research grade since it's thermoelectrically cooled and it has a self-guiding chip as well. I use a .3 focal reducer with it to get the maximum possible field of view onto the chip (is still only half a degree wide on its longest side) and use drizzle stacking to get back as much resolution as possible. I simultaneously shoot color images with an Atik Titan-C riding piggyback on the LX200 with an Orion ST-80. Combining the two allows me to colorize the monochrome but higher resolution ST-7 images. Here's the first example of this technique which I shot last weekend:

I used 5 minute exposures with the ST-7 over 4.3 hours and stacked with Deep Sky Stacker (2x drizzle enabled). I'll probably have to use shorter exposures with this comet since it's constantly moving. Probably 60 or 120 second exposures, we'll see. The advantage of shooting the color with a separate scope and one shot color camera is that you can maximize the telescope's time shooting luminance images (which gives you your detail in the image) and you don't have to worry about the comet moving between separate red/green/blue exposures with the monochrome camera. The disadvantage is lower detail in the color itself.

reply to post by abeverage


Here's my first image of comet Jacques. This is just the monochrome data from the ST-7 of course. I have yet to process the color data from the Atik to combine with this data.

h.dropcanvas.com...

How exciting! Give it a few weeks and when you google it there will be 101 conspiracies about it & a whole lot of doom porn! Lol! Thanks for posting!

This will not be an exciting bright comet for the general public, sorry. Often, the word "bright" in astronomical blogs and articles is very relative and only applies to those who use telescopes.

It's perhaps early days to state anything with great confidence (especially because comets can be unpredictable), but the ephemepris pages at MPC and JPL show that the maximum magnitude the comet will ever reach will be around 10.2 or 10.5, visible only in a telescope or big binoculars:
scully.cfa.harvard.edu...
ssd.jpl.nasa.gov...

reply to post by wildespace


Very true, but sadly that never stopped fear mongers from trying to capitalize on it. It wouldn't surprise me at all if BPearthwatch and others jumped on this and claimed it was proof of some sort of doom coming.

Anyway, here's a 45 minute timelapse of the comet's motion from last night:
h.dropcanvas.com...

I don't think you'll see a huge amount of posts from the Doom Crowd, as we don't have the MSM shouting at the top of their lungs that this is a big deal.

Of course that won't stop some posters claiming that the lack of reporting = COVER UP!!

Still, it's very exciting for these amateur astronomers to discover a comet, track it, study it, etc. Comet groups on Facebook are currently filled with posts and images of this comet.

Here's a confirmation image from Andres Chapman (Argentina) who worked with Cristovao Jacques via Facebook and desktop sharing:

Congratulations SONEAR! another beautiful comet discovered from Brazil. Had a very busy night yesterday with the company of Cristovao Jacques , a SONEAR team member. We were connected via FB and I shared my desktop to let Cristovao Jaques see my equipment working on the comet, prosessing frames and send the confirmation report to the MPC.
Ah..funny night it was!

This excitement and the real work done by amateurs on the comets is far more interesting and valuable than sensationalising MSM headlines or doom porn.

P.S. here's the observatory that was used to discover it: www.observatorio-phoenix.org...

Sonear - Synoptic Telescope 457mm (18 ") aperture with equatorial mount and CCD camera at prime focus to search for NEOs (Near Earth Objects).
Installed on equatorial mount Paramount and triggered remotely by Internet.

The drawings linked on that webpage suggest that it's a custom-built telescope.

Here's the colorized version of my photo. Pretty typical greenish hue to the comet.