Comet 53P/Van Biesbroeck

[rwilkinson]

Apparently, this and 42P/Neujmin are both fragments of a comet which disintegrated in 1845.

It's a 12th magnitude object in Capricorn at the moment (not far from the M72 cluster), so it's low in the South from our latitiude.
I first spotted it earlier this month from the iTelescope T16 in Nerpio, Spain:

Comet 53P from Spain on 12-Aug. 3x 200-sec with 150mm APO at f/7.3

53p_12aug.png (230.45 KiB) Viewed 2506 times

But then last night I got it from Bolton too (I had to set up my tripod further down the garden than usual, to get a better view to the South over the neighbouring houses):

Comet 53P from Bolton on 30-Aug. 24x 1-min with MX716 on C8 at f/3.3.

53p_30aug.png (187.92 KiB) Viewed 2506 times

It's tracking so slowly across the sky that its movement was barely discernible over the 50 minutes I was imaging it (I lost about 10 minutes of this, when a ribbon of cloud came over).
And as it was so low down (only 19 degrees above the horizon), I screwed my Orion LPR filter onto the back of my C8 for this imaging run.