- 8P/Tuttle
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8P/Tuttle 
Discovery Discovered by: Horace Parnell Tuttle Discovery date: January 5, 1858 Alternate designations: 1790 II; 1858 I; 1871 III;
1885 IV; 1899 III; 1912 IV;
1926 IV; 1939 X; 1967 V;
1980 XIII; 1994 XVOrbital characteristics A Epoch: January 15, 2008 Aphelion distance: 10.376340 AU Perihelion distance: 1.027132 AU Semi-major axis: 5.701737 AU Eccentricity: 0.819856 Orbital period: 13.6 a Inclination: 54.9830° Last perihelion: January 27, 2008 Next perihelion: August 27, 2021 [1] 8P/Tuttle (also known as Tuttle's Comet or Comet Tuttle) is a periodic comet in our solar system. Perihelion was late January 2008, and as of February was visible telescopically to Southern Hemisphere observers in the constellation Eridanus. On December 30, 2007 it was in close conjunction with spiral galaxy M33. On January 2, 2008 it passed Earth at a distance of 0.25 AU.
Comet 8P/Tuttle is responsible for the Ursid meteor shower in late December.[2]
Predictions that the 2007 Ursid meteor shower could be expected to be stronger than usual due to the return of the comet, [3] did not appear to materialize, as counts were in the range of normal distribution.
Contents
Contact Binary
Radar observations of Comet Tuttle in January 2008 by the Arecibo Observatory show it to be a contact binary.[4][5] The comet nucleus is estimated at about 4.5 km in diameter, using the equivalent diameter of a sphere having a volume equal to the sum of a 3km and 4km sphere.[6]
Additional images
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Tuttle on December 3, 2007 from Mount Laguna, California
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About 1.2 degrees from M33 on December 30, 2007.
Footnotes
- ^ 8P/Tuttle past, present and future orbits on Kazuo Kinoshita's home page
- ^ Meteor Streams
- ^ http://ursid.seti.org/WGNUrsids.pdf
- ^ Govert Schilling (2008-10-14). "Comet Tuttle's Split Personality". Science AAAS. http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/1014/3. Retrieved 2008-10-25.
- ^ J. K. Harmon, M. C. Nolan, E. S. Howell, and J. D. Giorgini (2008). "COMET 8P/TUTTLE: ARECIBO RADAR OBSERVATIONS OF THE FIRST BILOBATE COMET". Lunar and Planetary Institute. http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/acm2008/pdf/8025.pdf. Retrieved 2008-10-25.
- ^ "JPL Small-Body Database Browser: 8P/Tuttle". Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 2008-06-06 last obs. http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=8P. Retrieved 2010-02-25.
External links
- 8P at Kronk's Cometography
- 8P/Tuttle time sequence
- Comet Tuttle Seen To Be Returning
- Comet 8P/Tuttle. Canary Islands, Tenerife. 06.01.2008
- NASA Orbital Diagram
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9P/TempelCategories:- Comet stubs
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