Apparent Outburst of Comet 191P/McNaught
ATel #15052; Michael S. P. Kelley (U. Maryland), Tim Lister (Las Cumbres Observatory), Kritti Sharma (IITB), Vishwajeet Swain (IITB), Harsh Kumar (IITB), Varun Bhalerao (IITB), G. C. Anupama (IIA), Sudhanshu Barway (IIA) on behalf of the Zwicky Transient Facility Collaboration, the LCO Outbursting Objects Key Project, and GROWTH India Collaboration
on 19 Nov 2021; 21:39 UT
Credential Certification: Tim Lister (tlister@lco.global)
We report an apparent outburst of comet 191P/McNaught, discovered in Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF; Bellm et al. 2019, PASP, 131, a8002) data. Photometry of the comet in the r-band (5" radius aperture, PS1 photometric system) was 19.43+/-0.06 mag on 2021 Nov 13 at 10:26 UTC. The comet brightened to r=17.79+/-0.09 mag by the next observation on Nov 18 at 09:26 UTC, resulting in an apparent outburst strength of -1.64+/-0.11 mag in our photometric aperture. The outburst was confirmed in subsequent observations with the 0.7-m GROWTH India Telescope on Nov 18 at 18:52 UTC (r=18.19+/-0.08 mag) and a Las Cumbres Observatory 1-m telescope at the South African Astronomical Observatory on Nov 19 at 01:56 UTC (r=18.12+/-0.11 mag). At the time of the outburst discovery, the comet was 2.77 au from the Sun and 2.10 au from the Earth. The comet's last perihelion passage was 2021 March 20.
Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST-2034437 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, Weizmann Institute for Science, Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, University of Maryland, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Trinity College Dublin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and IN2P3, France. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW.
This work makes use of observations from the Las Cumbres Observatory global telescope network.
The GROWTH India Telescope (GIT) is a 70-cm telescope with a 0.7 degree field of view, set up by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) with funding from DST-SERB and IUSSTF. It is located at the Indian Astronomical Observatory (Hanle), operated by IIA. We acknowledge funding by the IITB alumni batch of 1994, which partially supports operations of the telescope. Telescope technical details are available at https://sites.google.com/view/growthindia/
