A Thomas Cooke camera solves a 52 year old comet mystery.
A comet found by Leonard Edwards (US Air Force base, near Timaru New Zealand) on June 19th 1971 on three 45 sec film exposures taken with a Baker – Nunn camera and were only reported a year later without a designation due to a lack of confirmation have just been found on additional photographs on 6 nights in 1971. The comet was of magnitude 10.
These 1971 images have been discovered after extensive searches by M Meyer and G W Kronk
Two of the images taken on June 19th and 20th 1971 have come from the 10 inch Franklin Adams star camera located at the Leiden Southern Station of the Union/Republic observatory at Harbeespoort, South Africa.
John Franklin Adams ordered two 10 inch and two 6 inch cameras from Thomas Cooke in 1897 on an English mount. They would be used to photograph both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres between 1902 and 1909. The Franklin Adam charts were the standard photographic star atlas until superseded by the Palomar star charts in the early 1950s.
This was the same 10 inch lens which had been donated to the Transvaal now the Union Observatory around 1910 that was used by Robert Innes in 1915 to discover Proxima Centauri
No comments:
Post a Comment