When students at South Tyneside Marine and Technical College learned about navigation at sea, they studied astronomy using the College’s planetarium and observatory. Now that navigation is done using the Global Positioning System, these facilities have become sadly unused. The college, now a place for general further education, is being redeveloped, which will see the observatory demolished and the telescope relocated to Stockton-on-Tees.

Last night, a few of us were lucky to get access to the scope and spend a couple of hours observing. It’s a 15″ Newtonian Reflector that’s built like a tank, and probably also weighs as much as a tank. Situated at the top of the main college building, it is supported by a reinforced steel column than runs from the ground floor up through the stair well, so the scope is very much part of the fabric of the building. Compared to the observatory at Kielder – which is architecturally interesting but a simple timber construction – this observatory has a kind of solidity and sense of permanence about it that makes you think that, given today’s need to build cheaply and quickly, its like will never be built again.

If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, the best time to see Comet Lulin will be when it passes Saturn and heads towards Regulus in the constellation of Leo from the 23rd of February onwards. It should be visible to the naked eye if you have clear skies and should look pretty good through binoculars.

A good way to track its progress – and find out how to spot it – is to use Stellarium. Stellarium is a piece of open source, cross-platform Planetarium software which has a database of 600,000 stars and other astronomical objects. However, a vanilla installation doesn’t have information about comets, so you have to add Lulin yourself.

To do this, you need to edit the Stellarium configuration file called ‘ssystem.ini’. This is found in different places depending on your operating system (note: you’ll probably need an admin/root password to do this):

Linux: /usr/share/stellarium/data/ssystem.ini
Mac: /Applications/stellarium.app/data/ssystem.ini (ctrl-click on the Stellarium.app icon >’ Show package contents’)
Windows: C:Program Files\Stellarium\data\ssystem.ini

At the bottom of the ssystem.ini file, add the following:

[lulin]
name = C/2007 N3 (Lulin)
parent = Sun
radius = 100
oblateness = 0.0
halo = true
color = 1.0,1.0,1.0
tex_halo = star16x16.png
tex_map = nomap.png
coord_func = comet_orbit
orbit_TimeAtPericenter = 2454842.112213313327
orbit_PericenterDistance = 1.211815031505141
orbit_Eccentricity = 1.000243857235593
orbit_ArgOfPericenter = 136.8421983153854
orbit_AscendingNode = 338.5047481504214
orbit_Inclination = 178.3725975895116
lighting = false
albedo = 1
orbit_visualization_period = 10000000000


Credit goes to Robert9 for the posting the above to this this forum, which is in turn based on data from the JPL Horizons database.

Once you save the file and run Stellarium, you should see Comet Lulin appear. Happy Comet watching!