I think the mods caught him quite fast.
Good job, mods!
I saw a warning thread to him come on earlier on but it seems to have been removed. He only manage to infect 3 threads before he was stopped.
WEPP8818 is probably a newbie to the internet, email and forums. He hasn't learnt the etiquette......give him a chance lah.

Not yet, hopefully tonight can start lah. Long holiday weekend ahead.
Last night I thought I would do it, but the sky was uncooperative as usual, couldn't even see Jupiter!

BTW congratulations on sighting Uranus!
Maybe if I manage to stay up the whole night until morning I might finish off with a glimpse of good old George too.....

Have you had any luck spotting any of the 73P/SW fragments yet? The sky has been hopeless over here in KL since last Saturday. If this goes on, I will have to make a special camping trip this weekend far away from KL. Can't afford to keep missing so many events......

The database corruption has me seeing stars!

Anyway, to repost, I missed 73P/SW fragment C on Sunday Night/Morning morning even though the sky was cooperative. I guess I was fixated on the Ring Nebula and the comet was still quite a distance from it!
Unfortunately this mistake could prove costly as the sky has closed up again.....

Yea, tonite it's do or die!

Unfortunately it's also raining cats and dogs now.... ....will the skies clear in time?

Hehe, there are already hundreds (maybe thousands?) of images of this comet peppered all over the internet from ppl with ultra-expensive equipment......this is the most imaged comet in history!

So I think my ambition is just to be able to see it with my own eyes.
Just imagine, the actual photons from the comet, travelling at the speed of light, entering my eye as I look at it realtime....

Eithanius, I think this is one you must see for yourself. One day you'll be telling your grandchildren you actually saw a comet breaking up!

I've been up all night hoping for a glimpse of the comet.....at midnight, the Moon and Jupiter were easily visible but nothing else. Things just went downhill from then. Then just now at 6.45 am, Venus and Vega peeked through the clouds with the sky already lightening.......aaaarggggggghhhhh! Another futile night.

Well, there's still hope over the next few nights.......

It seems impossible to get into the jpl.nasa site now for the latest high accuracy ephemerides -I only managed to generate one set for fragment C last night which I manually dumped into SNP. Have to try to get the whole set of 60 fragments today.

Now on playback, I know why I missed seeing this fragment last weekend - I was keeping a close watch on the Ring Nebula until 6.00 am but the comet only flew by it at 11.00 am! So bl**dy close, but a miss is as good as a mile!

This post has been edited by March05: May 13 2006, 07:36 AM

How come you got school today? I thought everybody was given a long weekend off specially to view the comet....

The sky looks a bit more favourable now than last night, it rained in the morning and doesn't look like it will rain again later..... Mr.LKM, this will be OUR night!

julchin_09, just get up at 3.00 am, look roughly North East, halfway between the horizon and right overhead. If you just look wildly all over this quadrant, (not Eithanius's Delta Quadrant please) chances are some of the photons from the comet will enter your eye even though you may not recognise it.....

White spots are caused by laser beams from your friends in Proxima Centauri, lah. The comet, on the other hand, leaves sparkling floaters in your eyes. That's what I've got after straining my right eye through the telescope eyepiece for hours this morning.

This morning around 3.30 am, the sky around Cygnus was moderately clear for about 30 minutes. A quick scan with the binos showed the stars down to 5th magnitude, but still no comets.
So out came the telescope. It was a rush job to get the telescope tracking accurately using Deneb and Geinah cygni. When I slewed the telescope to 73P/SW3 - fragment C, (or rather where it should be, based on the epheremis from JPL/NASA) I barely had a few seconds to catch a glimpse of a small faint and fuzzy patch before the whole view was wiped out by clouds. I waited in vain for the skies to clear so that I could confirm I had indeed caught my first view of the comet.

It looks like all the effort has go to waste again. Even the Moon, Jupiter, Vega, Arcturus all disappeared behind the clouds by 4.30 am......brave Venus rose and made a few seconds appearance at about 5.30 am before the clouds got it too.

[Yes, it is. As M. LKM says, you still need to do precise alignment. That's why I decided to select Dened and Geinah as secondary alignment stars to be as accurate as possible. Fragment B, based on JPL/NASA's data generated on 13th May, should have been very,very near Geinah at that time this morning. Fragment C, however, seems to be nearly identical to 73P/SW3 (1995)'s original path.

Does it show that in your SNP? I confirmed it on my version 4......

I think I have posted this before?
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/db_shm?sst...l&search=Search

Choose the fragment you want, then look for the little `generate high accuracy ephemeris' box, click on it, and it will take you to another menu to confirm the generation of the ephemeris. Be careful, this NASA site keeps crashing my Firefox - some javascipt bug problem......

Use the data and manually input it into the Solar System/Comets' menu on your Autostar handbox as new comets (choose add).

I have exactly the same data manually dumped into SNP. It is interesting to note that the realtime generation of the R.A. and Dec. positions of the fragments differs between SNP and Autostar by a few arc seconds up to almost an arc minute! I was running the telescope and SNP side by side this morning and I noticed this difference immediately.

Neat angle, your pic 1. I never thought to use SNP that way!
Can you try pic 2 again, but set for 3.00 am on 13th May? I think then fragment B, G and etc will be almost between Dened and Geinah. Thanks for the confirmation that Fragment C is still continuing near the original 73P/SW3 path.

I think I've figured it out. The discrepancy between SNP and Autostar was caused by the time setting: I've got SNP in my notebook running on Atomic time, and the Autostar running based on the wall clock in my living room (a couple of minutes difference). For most purposes, since Autostar does real star alignment, this doesn't matter. But the comet is moving so fast that the time error actually shows up! Next time I'll have to remember to hook up the Autostar to the notebook to syncronise the time to Atomic time too.

julchin_09: these are computer generation realtime simulations by Eithanius. Not curi from internet.

snowmei: how about Astronomy Photography Society of LYN? You're a member already, your nick is on the list.

This was the one I really wanted, you're a quick minded dude, Eithanius!

After 3 continous nights without sleep, I'm still in the twilight zone. I forgot that 13th night moves into 14th morning and I asked you for the wrong day. Thanks again. I also noticed that I spelt Deneb and Gienah wrong.

All images posted using the Forum's server get resampled and stamped with the LYN logo. That's why they get messed up, I think. If you want to retain your original quality, you'll have to link it to one of the third party image banks, I suppose.

snowmei: sorry for the kidding. If you need StarHunters' contact just holler. I know I've got it lying around somewhere...
Besides them, there's also the Astronomical Society of Malaysia, the infamous Astro Photographers Group of Malaysia, MNS Astro Special Interest Group, StarFinders......

But I don't need to mention my favourite one anymore.

Answer No. 1: AP of LY.N
Answer No. 2: I will try to find their business card (StarHunters) in my office tomorrow. Do you also need APGM contact?
Answer No. 3: 1st generation LX90AT no UHTC on temporary loan only.
Answer No. 4: No idea how much it weighs, but it is a Centrino.....already more than 2 years old, d*mmed good reliable workhorse.

Unfortunately, the AMD Turion Dual Core is still nowhere to be found.....but the Intel Core Duo is turning out to be a surprisingly good cpu.

The sky was looking good this evening, very few clouds, and the stars were smiling everywhere. But now a bit hazy. Hope it clears up again. I'm going to nap until 3.00 am and then get up to see whether I can finally get the comets in my sight. I just have no more energy to stay up another whole night....

I have to ponteng work this morning, dead tired after this morning's attempt to catch the comets. So just hang on a little while more for the contact numbers.

snowmei, your eyes are the first and most important astronomy instrument, you know. Without them, you can't see anything even if you have a super telescope. But without any other instrument, you can still see the stars.

BTW I have to report another failure to view the comet. The sky remained clear enough for me to easily find and track OY Pegasi - at 6.35 magnitude. Fragment C should have been just next to it (less than 9 arc minutes away), but I still couldn't see it. I guess the comet's brightness is still too low for direct eye viewing except under excellent sky conditions....may have to go for long exposure imaging if that is the case.

Ya, that's what most comets look like in the binoculars/telescope view.

I know what you mean, I'm a kampung boy from Pahang. But since coming to KL to cari makan, clear skies means maybe can see a couple of hundred stars.......

Unfortunately, work and family commitments don't allow me to run off to the the popular observation areas at the drop of a hat, not like during my school days, when I didn't have a care in the world......

Still, I've had the pleasure of seeing more than a handful of the brightest recent comets through the dusty KL skies, so it's not that bad.

I don't think I know of any other famous place with beaches and the initials PD.

Eithanius, what were you doing on the beach at night? If kissing your gf, I think those were not REAL shooting stars you saw lah....more like fireworks going off in your overloaded brain.

Mr.LKM, what happened to your precious Autostar?

About the contacts, I'm still searching........alamak, got thousands of unsorted business cards to check out! Anyone can lend me a name card scanner? Might as well digitise the whole lot while I'm going through them anyway.....

Don't be modest lah, maybe you can't remember which gf you were out with.....too many to keep track, eh?

Oh I think the ones coming from that Hunter fellow.....and since we're on this guessing game, which famous comet is believed to have caused this shower?

Eithanius, I need your help again, can you check your SNP and see whether on 15th May, around 3.30am to 4.00am, fragment C of 73P/SW3 passed within 50 arc minutes of Oy Pegasi (HIP 109212 in SNP). I've got it as about 27 arc minutes on my SNP but under 9 arc minutes on the Autostar. I'm still wondering whether I couldn't see the comet because the sky conditions were not good enough or both SNP and Autostar calculated wrongly in my notebook....

Sorry, I messed up the date again....it should be 16th May morning.

Epoch JNow or J2000 doesn't quite matter both are quite close. I'm using J(Now) by default.

Anyway, to save you the trouble of typing those figures in again (my fault for the mistake!) I'll give you my SNP data for both 15th & 16th May at 4.00 am.
--------------------------------------------------------
@ 0400hrs, 2006/05/16

73PSW3C
RA (JNow): 22h 7.710m
Dec (JNow): 17deg 31.106'
RA (J2000): 22h 7.409m
Dec (J2000): 17deg 29.269'

HIP 109212
RA (JNow): 22h 7.801m
Dec (JNow): 18deg 1.841'
RA (J2000): 22h 7.500m
Dec (J2000): 18deg 0.039'

Angular Separation: 30' 47"
--------------------------------------------------------
@ 0400hrs, 2006/05/15

73PSW3C
RA (JNow): 21h 47.221m
Dec (JNow): 20deg 9.367'
RA (J2000): 21h 46.928m
Dec (J2000): 20deg 7.677'

HIP 109212
RA (JNow): 22h 7.800m
Dec (JNow): 18deg 1.837'
RA (J2000): 22h 7.500m
Dec (J2000): 18deg 0.039'

Angular Separation: 5deg 18' 19"
--------------------------------------------------------

Notice that the data for HIP 109212 is exactly the same between your SNP and mine - so we are on the same SNP database for the stars.

A slight deviation for fragment C at 4.00 am, 15th May - less than 2'. You're using the SNP download, right? I'm using the JPL/NASA data. So that accounts for the marginal difference. Pls do a check if your SNP calculation for 4.00am 16th May matches mine to within a couple of minutes too.

If so, I think I have to conclude that I wasn't able to see the comet because the sky still wasn't clear enough. I could see the surrounding stars all the way down to magnitude 9, though. Those images posted by others gave the false impression that this comet would be quite easy to see.......

Looks like I'll have to really camp out in PD to see this comet!

Just another human being with a business card fetish.....

What objects are you going to use to check? I don't bother to update unless there's some new specific object I want to try to target with high accuracy. The only things requiring update are the comets and satellites. It is unlikely that the planets, stars and deep sky objects will have suddenly changed, right?


Eithanius, thanks for the final confirmation. There's little doubt that I was looking right at the comet, then.

Angular separation is basic geometry. Remember that the hypotenuse is the square root of the sum of the square of two other sides of a right angled triangle. Now derive the difference between the RA and Dec of both objects respectively and then input the data as the two sides of the triangle, therefore you have the angular separation.

Or you can just use the angular separation measurement feature in SNP.....hehhe. Simply change the cursor to the angular separation tool, point at HIP 109212, hold the left mouse button and then point at the comet, viola! you have the info!

This post has been edited by March05: May 20 2006, 02:24 PM