PS1SC Blog
Pan-STARRS is a groundbreaking project to survey the sky visible from Hawai`i looking for undiscovered asteroids, distant exploding stars and much more.
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January 18th, 2013 by ps1scblog
Perhaps you remember a 18 months ago we had a post about a new comet discovered by Pan-STARRS that was due to visit the inner Solar System in early 2013. The comet is currently observable by amateur astronomers with small telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere. One the 9th of January, John Drummond in New Zealand imaged C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) and measured its integrated magnitude to be 8.1. This is slightly brighter than the Minor Planet Center predicted brightness. If it maintains this brightness excess relative to the prediction, the peak brightness will be magnitude -0.2, which should make it visible to the naked eye in a dark sky. The comet is predicted to reach its peak brightness on March 10, when it should be visible low in the western sky right after sunset.
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The Pan-STARRS Project is being led by the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, and exploits the unique combination of superb observing sites and technical and scientific expertise available in Hawaii. Funding for the development of the observing system has been provided by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory. The PS1 Surveys have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen's University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the author(s), and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the PS1 Science Consortium or its member institutions.
