The Asteroid/Comet Connection's
daily news journal about
asteroids, comets, and meteors

Today's issue status: done

• News briefs – comet news, FMOP discovery
  & meteor news
• Risk monitoring

Cover: Gianluca Masi and Franco Mallia's imagery of C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) from the educational remote-controlled SoTIE telescope at Las Campanas, Chile on 13 May 2004. The images were “median-combined to remove stars and then enhanced with a Prewitt filter to show dust shells.” This image is used with permission. Press [Esc] on your keyboard to stop the animation at any of the three frames, and reload the page to start it again. North is up and east is left.

Comet news:  MPEC 2004-K61 today announces comet P/2004 K2 (McNaught) as discovered by Rob McNaught at the Siding Spring Survey (SSS) in Australia on May 20th and confirmed by four other observatories on the 23rd, 25th, and this morning. The first preliminary orbit calculation has perihelion on the 16th of next month at 1.599 AU, just beyond the orbit of Mars.

German Comet Section news reports that C/2004 H6 (SWAN) was independently discovered by Xing-Ming Zhou, K. Cernis, and M. Mattiazzo on May 13th, and that “more and more ground-based reports from Australia finally confirmed the new comet.” See also A/CC's report yesterday.

The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams has made public IAUC 8330 of April 23rd with Zdenek Sekanina's detailed explanation of circumstances that lead to the “sudden appearance of a prominent antitail” for C/2002 T7 (LINEAR).

FMOP discovery:  The Spacewatch FMO Project has an object that was posted to the Minor Planet Center's NEO Confirmation Page (NEOCP) sometime after 1630 UTC today. SW40Dl was found by online volunteer A.B. Marais “moving at nearly 10.6 deg/day. Its rate was little over our 10 deg/day limit and it is relatively faint. So it has poor chance of successful recovery.” [See update.]

Meteor news:  The Arizona Republic has a piece today, “Meteor odds? Funny you should ask,” about chances for being struck by a meteor. It mentions Walter Branch's hits list. Missing from that list is the apparently uncorroborated report of an English teenager being hit by a small piece in August 2002.

Following up on yesterday's news about other southwestern U.S. meteor sightings the night (20-21 May) of the Montrose, Colorado fireball, Jim Gamble tells A/CC that, although Sandia National Lab in

Meteor news continued >>

<< Meteor news continued from panel 1

Albuquerque, New Mexico didn't post a movie, it does have video that also shows the fireball caught from his El Paso, Texas all-sky camera that morning. And Chris Peterson tells A/CC that he has “several witness reports” of yet another “bright fireball” May 20th “between 2100 and 2130 seen over central Colorado, but apparently not by our cameras.” He comments that he suspects this cluster of four “apparently unrelated fireballs” over the wide southwestern U.S. during a period of about eight hours is a “statistical fluke.”

Risk monitoring 28 May

(There was no risk monitoring news to report today.)