2012 DA14

I took this photo of the Near-Earth asteroid 2012 DA14 using remotely-controlled telescope in Australia as it was rapidly approaching our planet . On this photo the asteroid is moving at 2200 arc-sec per minute through the southern constellation of Vela ("Sails"). The animation consists of three 1-minute frames taken through a 100 mm astrograph. 

Comet C/2012 K5 (Linear)

2 Feb 2013

One month later the comet is significantly dimmer  and is now at almost 1 AU from Earth

4 Jan 2013

This photo is take near comet's closest passage with Earth at a distance of approximately 47 million kilometers. The comet is located right at the ecliptic plane almost exactly opposite the Sun and therefore its tail is pointing almost directly away from the observer.

10 Dec 2012

Comet tail is over 1' in length

Interesting to compare with a photograph by M.Jager acquired one day earlier

24 Nov 2012

A photo of this long-period comet one week after perihelion passage. The comet will be closest to Earth on December 31, 2012.

Supernovae SN2012aw in Nearby Galaxy M95

I have been following this supernova with the idea to create a time-lapse movie of its fainting, but no noticeable decrease in its magnitude in visible light occurred while M95 was visible high in the sky. In fact, according to AAVSO light curve the reduction in magnitude between the time of discovery by Paolo Fagotti and Alessandro Dimai on March 16 2012 and the last time I was able to take a good photo on May 24 was less than half of magnitude.

This is not surprising since the spectrum revealed that sn2012aw is a Type-II supernova 

Here's its spectrum take by Christian Buil. Notice a very prominent H-alpha emission line at 656 nm -  a clear signature of Type-II. This meas that sn2012aw will shine for a while. Type-II supernovae have a plato in luminosity  that lasts over 100 days.

After a period of invisibility, I took another photo of the Supernovae in November. Now it's noticeably dimmer.

AAVSO light curve:

Also: 

SN2012aw progenitor was found on Hubble images:

Pre-maximum discovery photo (by Associazione Astronomica Cortina).  

PNV J18202726-2744263

4th 2012 Nova Sagittarius PNV J18202726-2744263 was discovered in Japan by Koichi Nishiyama and Fujio Kabashima as 7.8 magnitude object on July 7th. S&T sent out an AstroAlert and I was able to follow-up on it using iTelescope T20 in New Mexico. Here's a animation produced by overlaying a SERC survey image taken on 18-May-1987 . Bright star in the upper right corner is HR6842  +4.65m. 

AAVSO light curve is here.

2012 LZ1

2012 LZ1 is a large Near-Earth asteroid (~700m in diameter) which became very bright +14 as it flew by Earth (14 moon distances) on June 14.

Here it is images using iTelescope T4 with the exposure time of just 1'. Sky motion is about 40"/min. It's flying!

     AVK00A  tC2012 06 14.40844919 38 09.11 -23 44 19.3          15.4 V      H06

     AVK00A   C2012 06 14.41071819 38 10.22 -23 42 14.1          15.4 V      H06

     AVK00A   C2012 06 14.41280119 38 10.94 -23 40 24.8          15.5 V      H06

     AVK00A   C2012 06 14.41481519 38 11.87 -23 38 34.5          15.4 V      H06

Orbit diagram is here

And here is its trail during over 5 minutes exposure during the maximum approach to Earth taken using  T16 telescope in Spain. The length of the trail is about 2.5 arc-min.

Venus Transit

The following SOHO animation shows Venus approaching Sun's disk during the 4 & 5th of June.

And on the following image the bright object that quickly disappears on the left is Mercury!

And this is what we saw!

Nova Sagittarius PNV J17452791-2305213

On April 21st Stanislav Korotkiy and Kirill Sokolovsky from Russia discovered magnitude +9 Nova in the constellation Sagittarius. As reported in S&T here are their discovery images.

Here's its photo taken on April 30th, when its brightness fell down to ~12m.

 

This nova was also detected from STEREO spacecraft 


Here are two photos taken on May 1 and May 21 2012 (click on image to zoom in)