I had so much fun chasing comets in 2018, could I possibly enjoy it chasing asteroids in 2019? After all, they don’t have cool tails like comets. Or do they????? Occasionally they do, apparently related to recent collisions unleashing gases hidden dormant in asteroid innards. And that is what seems to have happened to Asteroid 6478 Gaultin Hydra. The AtlasProject in Hawaii (link below) recognized such a tailed asteroid recently involving a previously tail-less asteroid discovered by the Shoemakers in 1988. Don’t look for this visually. 6478 Gault is magnitude 18.5 and pretty low in Hydra in the wee hours of the morning. The asteroid itself is magn. 18.5; imagine how faint the tail is!!!! I took advantage of a tongue of dry air that pushed in to CAV Thursday morning (Jan. 17) after the Moon set at 3:30AM to capture five 20-minute exposures unbinned with the RCOS telescope and SBIG 16803 camera remotely. I made a gif animation similar to Damian Peaches which showed up on Spaceweather.com January 15 (link below). The asteroid may be getting a bit brighter each day but how long the tail will last who knows! So I jumped on it now!! Guess asteroids can be fun!! ……hoping for clear weather for the lunar eclipse …..Bill Williams P.S. – I did image a “Stringbean Comet” before in 2012. It had an eccentric orbit and really was a comet (see last link below)!!!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6478_Gault — wikipedia on Gault
http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=15&month=01&year=2019 – Damian Peach violates 6478 Gault
http://www.fallingstar.com/home.php — ATLAS Project!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phocaea_family – 6478 Gault’s family of inner belt asteroids
http://astroblogger.blogspot.com/2019/01/itelescope-alert-asteroid-6478-gault.html – Tailed Asteroid announcement
http://www.williamsseaandsky.com/?page_id=2803 — 2012 “Stringbean Comet”