June 4, 2023 – ALPO Comet News for June 2023
May was a quiet month for comet watchers as the sky was lacking in bright or even semi-bright comets. June should bring some improvement. C/2020 V2 (ZTF), which has been around magnitude 9.0 to 9.5 for most of the year, is again visible after passing solar conjunction. C/2021 T4 (Lemmon) and C/2023 E1 (ATLAS) are expected to start the month at 10th magnitude and reach magnitude 9 by the end of the month. C/2021 T4 (Lemmon) is primarily an object for southern hemisphere observers, while C/2023 E1 (ATLAS) is a northern-only object.
Last month the ALPO Comets Section received 60 magnitude estimates and images/sketches of comets C/2023 E1 (ATLAS), C/2023 A3 (Tsuchishan-ATLAS), C/2021 T4 (Lemmon), C/2020 K1 (PANSTARRS), C/2019 U5 (PANSTARRS), C/2019 T4 (ATLAS), C/2019 L3 (ATLAS), C/2017 K2 (PANSTARRS), 364P/PANSTARRS, 263P/Gibbs, 237P/LINEAR, 199P/Shoemaker, 133P/Elst-Pizarro, 130P/McNaught-Hughes, 99P/Kowal, 96P/Machholz, 81P/Wild, 219P/LINEAR, 103P/Hartley, 80P/Peters-Hartley, 77P/Longmore, 71P/Clark, and 12P/Pons-Brooks. A big thanks to our May contributors: J. J. Gonzalez, Jose Guilherme de Souza Aguiar, Carl Hergenrother, John Maikner, 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.
