GERALD_WECHSELBERGER@at.ibm.com (Gerald Wechselberger) [9 Dec 01]
Please find attached a picture of the comet Linear 2000 WM1 made with the ETX125EC and a digital camera Olympus 2020Z with 40mm eyepiece projection. No guiding. For my home position of 48 North and 16:23 East, i think that was the last chance to picture the comet at an altitude of 21 degree above the horizon. 2 little tails are visible, a lot of fog of the horizon right of the comet also. I added 9 images - each one exposed 16 seconds. Feel free to place this image on your ETX page. Thanks for running your page as the best ETX info repository and experience exchange i have seen so far on amateur astronomy.
stankiewiczr@home.com (Rick Stankiewicz) [26 Jul 01]
The Comet LINEAR shot was taken on July 14/01 @ 0405hrs with a Canon Ftb and Konica Centuria 800ASA film. I used a 135mm lense @ f/2.8 for 4 min. and was piggybacking on a Meade ETX 90 telescope. The comet was at mag. 4.4 and in Pegasus at the time.
GERALD_WECHSELBERGER@at.ibm.com (Gerald Wechselberger) [23 Jul 01]
On July 13th this year i tried to picture the Comet Linear C/2001 A2 with the ETX 125EC. It was the first chance here in Austria after weeks of bad weather and full moon during good weather. I used the Olympus 2020Z which i cooled simply between the shoots in the deep freezer for 3 minutes to minimize thermal noise which came up soon at outside air temperature of 25 Degree Celsius!! Each picture was exposed 16 seconds with 40mm Eyepiece projection. Neither visually nor on the pictures i could see a tail at that 'late' date! But the movement of the Comet is easy visible if you compare picture ~8 (00:22:52) and picture ~9(00:41:37).
Dick Seymour (rseymour@wolfenet.com)
Last night (19th July 10:30pm PDT = 20th Jul 5:30 GMT, Seattle) i went out with my ETX90 for a third evening's attempt to find Linear S4. I used Sky&Tel's coordiates ( www.skypub.com/sights/comets/0007linearS4.html ), panning from the 20th's toward the 21st's coordinates. And there it (maybe) was, a faint smudge forming a very acute triangle with a couple of other tiny stars, near the predicted spot. I popped in the Barlow for an effective 13mm eyepiece. And, as i continued to watch it over the next twenty minutes... it moved. The triangle gradually opened up toward isosceles-ness. Definitely a comet! There's a 5kbyte sketched gif attached to this note. North is up, west is -right-, as seen through the eyepiece. This shows something i keep forgetting, and happily rediscover... even though we're watching things happening over (pardon) astronomical distances... many of them change in short human-attention-span terms. A favorite of mine is to watch the dance of Jupiter's moons... if you watch for half an hour or so, you'll frequently see them come and go from behind or before the planet, change their relative positions, etc. A delight! have fun --dick (i won't mention the fight i had with creep-after-beep...) Mike here: yes, I know, it's not a photo but a drawing...