New comet C2010 B1 Cardinal

Having received my new ST8-XME CCD in December of last year, it has been nearly impossible to get decent images with it as the weather has been terrible. However on Friday Jan 22 the weather forecast showed a window of what could be decent skies in spite of the growing Moon. It was a coincidence that a NEOCP object popped up the in the Northern skies (Dec +73º) a difficult area for some telescopes such as some fork mounted designs. Anyway, the object was moving in a cometary orbit of high inclination (100º) according to Ramon Naves calculations with FindOrb. As for the night, the atmosphere was so stable I could even measure stars of FWHM=2, so a very good one indeed!

It was soon pretty obvious NEOCP F1A002 was not star, as the FWHM was consistently higher than those of nearby stars. After adding up far more images of even better quality as the object was culminating the sky, a small coma of 7.5" could be unmistakably measured.

R. D. Cardinal (Rothney Astrophysical Observatory, University of Calgary) was the first to note the object with a 0.50-m f/1.0 reflector. Y. Ikari (Moriyama, Shiga-Ken, Japan, 0.26-m refelctor), D. Chestnov (images taken by T. Kryachko at Engelhardt Observatory, 0.30-m) and L. Buzzi (Varese, Italy, 0.39-m) also noted its cometary nature.