October 5, 2023 – ALPO Comet News for October 2023
After the excitement of C/2023 P1 (Nishimura) last month, you might think October will be a little less eventful for comet watchers. While it is true that October won’t deliver a 2nd to 4th magnitude comet like Nishimura was its brightest, there are a large number of comets expected to be brighter than 10th magnitude.
Short-period comets 2P/Encke and 103P/Hartley will be nice 7th to 8th magnitude objects in the morning sky. C/2023 H2 (Lemmon) is a bit of a wild card but could rival Encke and Hartley this month. One of next year’s highlights is in the news again as 12P/Pons-Brooks has experienced yet another multi-magnitude outburst, though whether it will be brighter than 11th magnitude this month is still to be seen.
Last month the ALPO Comets Section received 244 observations of comets C/2023 P1 (Nishimura), C/2023 H2 (Lemmon), C/2023 E1 (ATLAS), C/2022 JK5 (PANSTARRS), C/2022 A2 (PANSTARRS), C/2021 X1 (Maury-Attard), C/2021 T4 (Lemmon), C/2021 S3 (PANSTARRS), C/2020 V2 (ZTF), C/2020 K1 (PANSTARRS), C/2017 K2 (PANSTARRS), 311P/PANSTARRS, 237P/LINEAR, 202P/Scotti, 126P/IRAS, 103P/Hartley, 30P/Reinmuth, 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann, 13P/Olbers, 12P/Pons-Brooks, 2P/Encke. A big thanks to our August contributors: Dan Bartlett, Michel Besson, Denis Buczynski, Dan Crowson, Jose Guilherme de Souza Aguiar, Michel Deconinck, J. J. Gonzalez Suarez, Christian Harder, Scott Harrington, Carl Hergenrother, Eliot Herman, Michael Jäger, John Maikner, Gianluca Masi, Martin Mobberley, Mike Olason, Uwe Pilz, Ludovic Prebet, Michael Rosolina, Greg Ruppel, Chris Schur, Tenho Tuomi, and Chris Wyatt.
The monthly ALPO Comet News PDF can be found here. A shorter version of this report is posted on a dedicated Cloudy Nights forum. All are encouraged to join the discussion over at Cloudy Nights.
