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Observation of Comet C/2006 VZ13 LINEAR with the Kavalur 40-inch SCT!!

Recently during Akarsh's and My 4-night trip (between 9th and 13th July) to Kavalur Observatory (with some college teachers for THEIR research work) when the weather was bad for spectroscopy and as we waited, we had the privilege to observe 4 objects (M22, M27, NGC 6826/Blinking Planetary and this comet) through the eyepiece of the 40-inch f/13 SCT telescope!!! The telescope operator during this night of 12/13th May was Mr. Kuppuswamy (one of the co-discoverers of Uranus' rings!) and his assistant Mr. Muneeraj. The former got interested and finally agreed when I told him a comet is visible in the sky! I got the precise co-ordinates of VZ13-LINEAR and we entered it in the telescope console. The scope pointed at the location. After that, looking into the eyepiece he manually scanned the 40-inch monster with a small hand pad. I waited for him to hunt it down, and finally when he gave up after some 10-15 mins...I took over!!! But due to some high upper layer thin haze, insufficient dark adaptation, very low field of this 1-metre scope (only 10-arcminutes or 1/3rd Full Moon!!) we both couldn't get it. Simultaneously I used to every time run two floors up & down in the same Observatory building to the computer room to see it's position in Cartes du Ciel software which I myself installed, hence ruining my dark adaptation each time!

Finally I could make out the improvement in the sky when the very thin haze passed out and background sky became more clearer/darker. As mentioned, by now I had the control of the 1-metre scope and it's hand pad!!! Myself moving the scope around for some 10-15 mins, initially struggling to get it due to bad dark adaptation, I "fortunately" stumbled across a pretty faint and fuzzy patch not easily visible. First it looked like something else or a cloud patch but later on staring there revealed it to be a pretty evident diffuse patch...that HAD to and later on confirmed to be the comet!! It's visible boundaries were around 1/4-1/5th the field of view or ~2 arc-minutes, tallying with the observations of the other foreign observers. I showed it to the two telescope controllers there Mr. Kuppuswamy and Mr. Muneeraj who glimpsed it. I ran down 4 floors to the ground floor to wake Akarsh up but he was very sleepy and missed it out. The telescope console showed the "precise" position to be R.A. = 23h 01' 34.6" and Dec. = +48o 20' 05" at 03:35am on 13th of June. Frankly speaking the view was VERY disappointing and would have been better with our own small scopes, but still I am so privileged to have hunted and observed a new comet with such a monster!! My sincere thanks to Mr. Kuppuswamy for willing to point the big-scope at this 10th mag one-time visitor in Andromeda. This is totally my 14th comet "seen" till now! :-)