Monday, May 21, 2018

comets faraway

The simplest possible diagram of orbital alignement (degrees) of comets between 200-2000 AU (average), just because en.wikipedia was missing this. There's likely some observational bias here, as I believe the comets are easiest to find near the celestial north pole. It's pretty easy to point a wide-field telescope towards Stella Polaris, and take an overnight shot or several. Comets would show as ripples or lines curving out or in between the regular arcs of normal stars.

(data:wikipaedia/List_of_near-parabolic_comets
image of C/2014 Q2 (flipped) as the background (friibii))

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