Comet 123P/West-Hartley: an image (9 Dec. 2018)
Comet 123P/West-Hartley orbits the Sun with a period of 7.6 years. Its next perihelion will be on 5 Feb. 2019. With this image, we started monitoring it.
Comet 123P/West-Hartley: 11 Dec. 2018
The image above comes from the average of four, 300-seconds exposures, unfiltered, remotely collected with the “Elena” (PlaneWave 17″+Paramount ME+SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit available at the Virtual Telescope Project in Italy. The robotic telescope tracked the apparent motion of Comet 123P, so stars left trails on the background. The image scale is 1.2″/pixel.
The comet shows a nice, little tail pointing WNW. While this comet is not expected to become bright, we plan to observe it again in the upcoming months, so stay tuned.
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