Comet 9P/Tempel 1 Observations Made at Mt. Laguna Observatory

Deep Impact Support Observations
Comet 9P/Tempel 1 was observed at San Diego State University's Mt. Laguna Observatory (MLO) during the Deep Impact event on 2005 July 4 UT. Below are some animations made from those observations. The comet's brighenting due to the impact is clearly visible about halfway through the video.
To keep the size of the animations small, only every 10th image is shown. The time step per frame is about 54 seconds, and the total elapsed time of the movie is about 2 1/2 hours. The increase in brightness near the end of the animation is due to increasing airglow as the telescope points closer and closer to the horizon as 9P/Tempel 1 sets.

mpeg animation (black and white; 2h 17m elapsed) (5.0 MB)
mpeg animation (pseudo color; 2h 17m elapsed) (3.6 MB)
"cleaner" mpeg animation (black and white; 2hr 34 min) (4.7 MB)
larger mpeg animation (pseudo color; 2hr 34 min) (8.8 MB)

animated gif image of CCD images
The above animated gif was constructed by Merek A. Chertkow, REU student at San Diego State University.

Click this link for details of the observations and the movie production.

Credits:
SDSU/Mt. Laguna Observatory
Dr. William F. Welsh
Dr. Paul B. Etzel
Dr. Robert Leach
Mr. Merek A. Cherkow
This research was enabled by the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) managed by Hans-Werner Braun and Frank Vernon of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) with support from National Science Foundation Grant Numbers 0087344 and 0426879.
Mr. Cherkow was supported by the CSUURE program at SDSU, part of the National Science Foundation's REU program (grant AST-0453609).


Please send comments to William Welsh: wfw@sciences.sdsu.edu