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:
Attachment:
File comment: Comet 53P from Spain on 12-Aug. 3x 200-sec with 150mm APO at f/7.3
53p_12aug.png [ 230.45 KiB | Viewed 2084 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):
Attachment:
File comment: 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 2084 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.
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