Comet144P Kushida and Aldebaran

 

The bright alpha star in the Constellation  Taurus -Aldebaran and the periodic comet 144P Kushida February 2024. Composite image - using data from the COAST robotic telescope on Mount Teide, Tenerife and the Canon 600d DSLR at the Jodrell Plank Observatory. Credit : Pip Stakkert and Open University, Open Observatories, telescope.org The bright star in the middle of the image is Aldebaran and the fuzzy green ball upper right edge is the comet.
 

"We had planned to image the comet's close visual encounter with Aldebaran from Lowestoft and had programmed the COAST Robotic telescope to take a similar image as a fall back if the weather at Lowestoft was poor. For the period of time the comet was close to Aldebaran the weather in Lowestoft was atrocious. Sadly Mount Teide was also crowned with cloud and our programmed image was delayed until the weather improved. By the time the COAST telescope captured an image, the comet had moved out of the robotic telescope's relatively small field of view, leaving just a picture of Aldebaran and the surrounding stars.

Not to be thwarted, we decided to make a composite image using cometary data that we had captured a week ago using our Canon 600d DSLR and a Samyang 135 lens and the COAST image of Aldebaran  using BVR filters. The difficult bit was determining the exact location of the comet against the unchanging star field. We did this by consulting on-line planetarium software and by studying images taken by other UK astro-imagers. We hope our composite imagery hits the spot.

Aldebaran is just over 65 light years distant from our Solar System whilst Comet 144P Kushida is much closer at approximately 112 million kilometres. This equates to being six light minutes away and virtually on our doorstep. As a periodic comet, Kushida never leaves our Solar System following an elliptical orbit. It visits the inner  most part of the Solar System approximately every 7 years. So all being well, we shall see it again in our 'neck of the woods'  in 2031".- Joel Cairo CEO of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.