Comet?

Edward Lubat

Hi Adam

This is not a processing question, so feel free to ignore.  But I was hoping you might be able to answer this question or point me in the right direction.  Last August 29/30, I imaged NGC 6960 (in a small field of view inspired by an image I saw in one of Rob Gendler's books).  When I loaded the light frames into PixInsight's Blink, there was an obvious small slowly moving obect near the center, just above the bright star.  After debayering, it was green, looked like a comet.  I looked in the planetarium program I use (TheSkyX) but there was nothing there.  I tried reporting the finding to the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams as per online instructions but never heard back.  Also left a message for my local astronomy club, but never heard back either. It has been bugging me ever since.  How do I figure out what it is?  Here is the video (before debayering):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HEX4V8vt3jPNCsa29nlN5pFLUxsnr6Sp/view?usp=sharing

Ed

BlockHead

Have you ever seen the Antiques Roadshow? Someone brings something on that is labeled "Tiffany" or perhaps purports to be an artifact from an Aztec city from long ago... and the appraisers gently begin to point out the things that "don't make sense" with respect to the provenance and story... 

Well... this is something of the same. Any time you have a bright star in the field all kinds of red flags go up. It really doesn't look like a comet (which would have a star-like nucleus/center usually) and it doesn't move like one either (kinda wiggles). My guess is that this is some sort of reflection due to the star. (Focal reducers are notorious for this, so are some kinds of narrowband filters.) It looks like a double reflection...I note that your alignment of images is in the exact opposite direction of motion of your "comet." I can tell the direction based on the motion of the hot pixels in the image which are moving downward.

So... I would have definitely asked a friend or forum to assist in confirming your find before querying the CBAT. As I think you know, the submission needs to be extremely high quality/confidence with all of the i's dotted and t's crossed. You certainly have to send them a file with astrometry of this object (which I am guess you did not). Typically you also need to follow up with several more night's data and you have to be submitting from an observatory with a code (that way they know you can do the astrometry correctly). And all of this would not guarantee a response... but it would increase the likelihood. 

So in my opinion... you didn't miss anything and you can rest easy. 

 -the Blockhead