CCD Astrophotos
…….. By David Jarinko

C/2000 wm1, aka-the Christmas Comet. This comet was discovered as an asteroidal object by the now familiar LINEAR team in mid December 2000. It was later established that this was a comet heading for a Christmas rendezvous, thus the Xmas comet was born. In August the comet began to show a small tail on ccd images. The comet is presently just visible to the naked eye (9 Dec 01) just south east of Cetus the whale from any dark site. The comet is rapidly moving south toward perihelion on

22 Jan 02 at a magnitude of 4.5 and A.U. 0.55. But this will only be visible to the southern hemisphere. It will then move northward giving everyone a last chance to say goodbye.

The image is a mosaic of 4 separate composite images taken through out the evening of 9 Dec 01. You may notice that some images show streaking stars, this is because the images were combined centered on the comet and not the stars, thus the stars appear to move. The comet was at mag. 5.1 and each individual shot was about 10 to 20 seconds in length.

So from the Christmas Comet - HAVE A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Digital Camera Eclipse Photo
…….. By Michael Daniel

This was done on Dec 14th in the parking lot where I work at American Airlines using an afocal set-up by putting the digital camera directly up against the eyepiece of my Meade LX 50 telescope. I made a number of them about 4:10pm (maximum cover was at 4:00pm). I printed one of these on my brand new Hewlett-Packard Photosmart printer and you would have to see it to believe it. This printer is about the size of one of those Foster's quart-beer cans laid on its side and makes 4X6 inch prints on photo paper. It is so cool!

[Editor's Note: I don't know if the printed copy or the web version will do justice to this, but hopefully you can see that it actually got great detail on the sunspots!]