On May 14, 2001, the NEAT team announced the discovery of another comet. This 18.5m faint comet was positioned in the constellation Crater. The Minor Planet Center noticed the identity with an asteroidal object announced by LINEAR on April 23. The resulting elements yielded a solar distance of 7.5 AU! This comet would pass perihelion in summer 2003 at about 2.8 AU (IAUC 7624). It was expected to get brighter than 12m between the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2004 (max. around 11m).
According to 56 estimates by 9 members of the German Comet Section and 275 international ones until fall 2004 the brightness can be represented by the formulae
resulting in a first maximum of 11.8m during the first half of February 2003. The apparent coma diameter was 0.8' at the beginning of 2002 and has increased to twice that value until February 2003. During October/November 2003 it peaked at 1.8'. The variations of the apparent coma diameter represent very well the changing distance earth-comet, because the absolute coma diameter remained nearly constant at 175.000 km. The degree of condensation varied between DC 3 (greatest distance to earth) and DC 4-5 (smallest distance earth-comet); thus it is more plausible to claim a constant DC-value of about DC 4. Very few observers reported visual tail sightings up to 3' length.
Total Brightness and Coma diameter
Andreas Kammerer
