The newsletter for the Northeast Kansas Amateur Astronomers’ League Inc.
There is a comet-looking object on the NEOCP that is likely the next interstellar to enter our solar system. The object is temporarily designated as gb00234. It was discovered by L51 Margo observatory a couple of nights ago. Here is a rather
poor image taken just as dawn was breaking on 09-11-19.
The image is a composite of 3 – 1 minute images taken with an ST10 XME camera mounted on the 0.57meter Little Blue Reflector. It will be interesting to see what media does with this.
Gary Hug
Here’s M87 taken with my 22″ Reflector and an ST-8 CCD camera. The image show the jet of material traveling at some percentage of the speed of light while being squeezed out before reaching the event horizon . This does correlate with the black hole at M87 center that was recently ‘imaged’ and publicized. The ST-8 image taken at Sandlot Observatory was imaged on 04-02-19.
This image by the Event Horizon Telescope project shows the event horizon of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the M87 galaxy. Credit: EHT Collaboration
A long known asteroid suddenly sprouted a long narrow tail. This is a 22 minute (45 secs x 30) cropped imaged taken with the Tombaugh Reflector at Farpoint 01-10-19 about 8:00 U.T. The tail was visible faintly in each of the 45 second images. This asteroid may have developed the tail through an impact with another rock. [T08] ATLAS Mauna Loa images 1-5.5 U.T. showed a comet like tail extending from the asteroid and comments started flowing on mpml and comet ml list servers. A couple of months ago it went through a 2 magnitude outburst and is still at that level as of last night. 
I originally thought A/2018 V3 was an asteroid (although it may end up being a comet) with a very long perihelion distance. But I was wrong; its max distance is just 4 A.U.’s but the eccentricity is .989( 99 times longer than wide orbit) and its inclination to the solar system is 165 degrees (almost perpendicular.)
Anyway some of the objects in our NEO follow-up program are as faint or even a bit dimmer than 21.5 V magnitude. Even with the arrow pointing to the object its hard to see. Only with consistent movement in the predicted angle is it identifiable as a target. This image is a combination of 14 – 2minute images taken on the night of 11-14-18 and severely cropped. At the time the MPC listed it as 21.6 V magnitude. It would also be easier to see inverted (dark stars on white background) .
Gary
This 5 minute image of the returning comet 21P (Giacobini-Zinner) was taken Sept 16, 2018 using a Cannon EOS coupled to an Apogee 80mm F6.25 refractor. The mount was a SST EQ-25 HPFD . At the time of this image, the comet was in the middle of the constellation Auriga.
During a recent visit to England I had an opportunity to visit with Peter Birtwhistle at his home at Great Shefford. Peter is one of the most prolific observers for NEO follow-up in the world. Here we are in front of his backyard observatory (MPC J95) which houses a 16″ LX200 SCT in the small town of Great Shefford. He has developed his own software that allows manipulating image files to produce accurate results of NEO targets.
This is an image taken just before dawn 07-11-18 with the new (to us) STL 6303E camera mounted on the Tombaugh .7 meter Reflector at 2 bin pixels ( 18 micron).
Gary
There’s a small sunspot just left of top- center of the image.
Taken with an 80mm f/6 Apogee Refractor and a Cannon EOS.
ISO 100 – 1/500th second.
Thousand oaks Mylar solar filter in front of the lens.
Patrick Wiggins in Utah last night appears to have discovered a Supernova in the Galaxy NGC6946 located in Cygnus. I took this image at Sandlot Observatory just a few hours after he found it.. The potential SN is marked in the image and is about 13.0 R Magnitude. Date 5-14-17
