International Comet Quarterly

News Regarding Comets

Special dated news items:

  • NOTE: The ICQ website has formally moved from this SAO/CfA website to EPS/Harvard; for updated information, go to the ICQ's new website.
  • The Edgar Wilson Award for comet discoveries in 2009-2010 has been announced (see IAUC 9158), with five recipients, for five different comets. [Earlier Wilson Award recipients.] [9/24/10]
  • The only ground-based-observable comets currently known to be brighter than total visual magnitude 12 are C/2009 K5 (near total visual mag 10-11), 2P (near total visual mag 11-12), 10P (near total visual mag 8.5-9), and 103P (near total visual mag 8-9). [9/24/10]
  • Comets in urgent need of photometric observation
  • We are gradually making various articles and data of past published issues of the ICQ available here on the ICQ website.
  • The 2010/2011 Comet Handbook has been mailed out in Nov. 2010. Note that there was a delay in publication schedule of the 2010 issues, due to the move of the ICQ from SAO to EPS/Harvard. The January 2010 quarterly issue of the ICQ was mailed on 2011 April 12. The April and July 2010 issues are in preparation and should be published/mailed by late May 2011. (The July 2009 quarterly issue of the ICQ was combined with the October 2009 quarterly issue and mailed on 2010 Jan. 27.) [Other recent ICQ mailing dates.]
  • Special ICQ observing project.
  • Joe Marcus has made a prediction for the brightness of comet 169P/NEAT during December 2009 and January 2010 based on his work with forward-scattering enhancement due to observing geometry. His preliminary pre-publication text is available now at the ICQ's online-articles webpage. [12/15/09]
  • The fourth International Workshop on Cometary Astronomy (IWCA IV) was held in Shanghai, China, on Thursday, 2009 July 23 (where the path of solar-eclipse totality passed the previous day). The fifth IWCA was a success in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Saturday, August 8, at the city planetarium, in conjunction with the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union. [8/8/09]

  • ALERT! We have introduced additional screening software to block spam e-mail, due to its prolific increase; it is strongly recommended that those sending e-mail to the ICQ or the CBAT remove ALL html-encoded text, as we cannot read such text easily (we do not use web browsers for reading e-mail) and such text may be deleted by our anti-spam software. (This means: send plain ASCII text *only*, *not* plain ASCII text plus html-encoded text in same message. The vast majority of ICQ contributors have no problem sending ASCII-only e-mail with contributed observations, so HTML-encoding is a natural place to attack SPAM e-mail since the vast majority of SPAM has html-encoding.) [11/14/03].

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