On images taken on Aug. 16, 2014 the PanSTARRS team discovered a comet of magnitude 18.5 in the constellation Sculptor, near the border to Cetus. Follow-up observations of comet C/2014 Q1 (PanSTARRS) showed a strongly condensed 17" coma of magnitude 17.5^m, but no tail. The comet will reach perihelion at only 0.30 AU on July 6, 2015, expected to reach magnitude 3.0 (CBET 3933 / MPEC 2014-R69). It is 1.5-2.0 mag brighter than the crucial magnitude a comet should have (according to the Bortle formula) to not break apart near perihelion. Alas, at the time of perihelion its elongation will be less than 15°, so it can only be glimpsed in bright morning or evening twilight. Mid-European observers can only follow it under a dark sky until the beginning of February 2015, when it is expected to be of magnitude 15.

It was only with utmost effort and much struggle that images of this comet could be taken during the days around perihelion in the dusk from mid-European locations, which nevertheless showed the comet only as a faint smudge. Such images were successfully captured by Thomas Lehmann and Michael Jäger. The latter also succeeded in taking some awful images from Namibia, showing the comet with a fully developed and dynamic gas tail and a dust tail almost perpendicular. Would the geometry of the Sun-Earth-Comet system had been more favourable this comet would have been a very nice object, but in reality it was only an object for specialists. Based on 100 observations the brightness evolution can be well described - despite the unfavourable cicumstances - by the formula

implying a maximum brightness of 3.7 mag at perihelion.

Total Brightness and Coma Diameter

The evolution of the other cometary paramaters is still more uncertain. According to the observations the coma diameter did not start to increase until four weeks prior to perihelion, reaching its maximum of 7' (350.000 km) around July 20, 2015, only to decrease rapidly again after that date. During these days, at which the comet was leaving the twilight zone as viewed from the southern hemisphere, the coma reached its highest degree of condensation (DC 7-8), which decreased thereafter, reaching DC 3 in mid-August. At the same time, too, the visually noticed, southeast pointing tail reached its maximum length of 2.5° (appx. 9 Mio km).

Andreas Kammerer