Comet 2013A1 Siding Spring on Oct 19, 2014, Rendez-vous with Mars


Date & Time: Oct 19 2014, from 18:13 to 18:19 JST(+0900)
Composed 6 shots with 1min. exposed
Optical: TAKAHASHI 16cm(6.3") epsilon (f=530mm, F3.3)
Auto-guided with TAKAHASHI EM-200 Equatorial
Digital Camera: Canon EOS 550D (Remodeled)
Location: Hitachi city, Ibaraki pref.

Camera Settings: Recording format...14bit CCD-RAW, converted to 16bit TIFF(5184×3456)
Sensitivity...ISO800


This image shows you the comet Siding-Spring about 9 hours prior to its great approach to the Mars. The comet has positioned in Ophiuchus, around lower southwest dusk skies with a visual brightness of about 11th magnitude. In that time the elongation between these two objects was about 23 arc minutes. They approached with an elongation of about only 1.5 arc minutes in around 18:30, Oct 19, 2014 (UT), the closest apparoach could not be observed at Japan. The unprecedented "near miss", about 140 thousand km (87.5 thousand miles) in real distance, had been observed with several spacecrafts orbiting around the Mars.
  The image has been cropped with an equivalent f=1200mm. (View angle: 1.06×0.71°)


2014Q2 Lovejoy on Dec 14, 2014
2013UQ4 Catalina on Jul 26, 2014

Copyright(c) 2014 by Naoyuki Kurita, All rights reserved.
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