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R: (meteorobs) An *optical* photograph of a comet's dust trail ...



----- Original Message -----
From: Daniel Fischer <dfischer@astro.uni-bonndot de>
To: <meteorobs@atmob.org>
Sent: Friday, July 05, 2002 7:06 PM
Subject: (meteorobs) An *optical* photograph of a comet's dust trail ...


> ... can be seen at
www.astro.uni-bonndot de/~dfischer/news/pics/497gross.jpg -
> it shows 22P/Kopff on Feb. 14 this year and was taken with the Kibo 105 cm
> Schmidt by Ishiguro & al., Astrophys. J. Lett. 572 [June 10, 2002]
L117-20.
>
> The authors make the case that this cannot be tail (the comet was at 3 AU
> from the Sun) but must be a dust trail of cm-sized dust particles that
> Kopff shed during the last perihelion passage 5.6 years earlier - the
> very phenomenon that we get our meteor storms from when the Earth hits
one.
>
> This is apparently the first clear optical picture of such a trail. What
> the authors do not discuss in their brief paper is why one can see this
> phenomenon in the optical only in this comet (because of its short
orbit?) -
> and whether one can learn something about the 3D structure of dust trails
> from this kind of observations, improving meteor storm predictions.
>
> Dan

Perhaps it' s exact but unfortunely the comet 22P/Kopff has a
perihelion to 1,58 U.A. therefore we cannot see this beautiful meteor
shower.
Roberto Gorelli


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