More dreary news about "the comet of the century." It may not even reach naked-eye brightness. -- Joe On Monday, October 14, 2013 8:18 PM, "respuestas2013@gmail.com" <respuestas2013@gmail.com> wrote: Hi all: I have just finished updating the secular light curves in the R and Visual bands. I have added a new Section of Magnitude Prediction. The law that comes out of the plots is m(Visual)(Delta,R,0) = 8.12 + 5 Log Delta + 2.40 Log R + 0.01 Alpha where Delta is the distance Comet-Earth, R the distance Comet-Sun and Alpha the phase angle. It is rather surprising to find a phase dependence of the coma because a coma made up of only gas would not show such an effect. That is why I concluded a few days ago, that the light from the coma was dominated by the dust and not by the gas. This has now been confirmed. Christian Buil took a spectrum of the comet and it is difficult to discern the atomic lines. The spectrum is mostly continuum. http://www.astrosurf.com/buil/comet/ison/obs.htm You will notice that the slope is very very shallow, 2.4 which implies n=0.97, almost flat. In fact both plot suggest that the comet is leveling off. From past experience (that is comets Hönig, LINEAR, Tabur and Elenin), we know that after the comet levels off in brightness it disintegrates in a matter of day or hours. If the comet exhibits a leveling off in three data sets, I will issue the RED ALERT. The comet is now in ORANGE ALERT. As suggested by the plots, this point may not be far away. Do not believe me. Go to the plots and reach your own conclusion. I am now working on the other data sets. Another conclusion from the plots is that the comet will not even reach to naked eye magnitude. Sorry folks. Disruption will be manifested by an elongation of the coma increasing with time. That corresponds to the debris spreading along the orbit. Thus observers should watch for a change in morphology of the coma. At this moment it is of the outmost importance that observations be made every clear night and that they be reported as soon as possible. I am updating the page daily. It is hard work, believe me. Here is the full report: http://astronomia.udea.edu.co/cometspage Ignacio Ferrin Institute of Physics, Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences University of Antioquia Medellin, Colombia oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo __._,_.___ Reply via web post Reply to sender Reply to group Start a New Topic Messages in this topic (1) Recent Activity: * New Members 1 Visit Your Group Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest • Unsubscribe • Terms of Use • Send us Feedback . __,_._,___