New sighting of Comet Neuj min 1
Observers at the Mount John Observatory at Tekapo have made the world’s first recorded sighting on the present return of the comet Neujmin 1, which returns every 18 years. The husband and wife observer team of Alan Gilmore and Pamela Kilmartin found the comet on a photograph taken from one of the University of Canterbury observatory’s 61cm reflecting telescopes on February 28.
They reported that the comet looked like a starlike point of light moving slowly through the constellation of Scorpius. It was very faint — 60,000 times fainter than the faintest star visible to the naked eye — and was barely recorded on two 60-minute exposure photographs with the telescope. The comet was very
close to its predicted position in the sky. Comet Neujmin 1 was first discovered in 1913. It moves in an elongated orbit that takes it between 230 million kilometres to 1850 million kilometres from the Sun.
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Press, 6 March 1984, Page 3
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156New sighting of Comet Neuj min 1 Press, 6 March 1984, Page 3
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