Astronomy objects seen from Sweden
April 2018

With this star chart I want to show what comets there are up now in April 2018. The nights become brighter and brighter at the end of this season, last chance to see something if you live north! I have chosen comets that are brighter then magnitude 16, in the center you have zenith and the field of view is 310 degrees. I have it oriented so the north is at the bottom. If you hold it over your head and bottom pointing to north or flip it up side down and pointing to south it will be correct. For each five days there is a comet dot, ten of them make 50 days.

There are a lot of comets visible now, but they are all of weak brightness.

The only comet I have seen visual was Hyakutake 1996, more than 20 years ago. All these comets are to weak to see visual, I'm not even sure it could be done with a telescope. But with my telescope and with a camera I have catch comets down to magnitude 16, if you have a darker place that is not light polluted like my place you can detect much weaker comets.

Here are two tutorials I have written that maybe could be of some help if you want to try to take a photography of a comet:

• ../../tutorials/tutorial-find-comets/tutorial-find-comets.html
• ../../tutorials/tutorial-comet-photography-planning/tutorial-comet-photography-planning.html

But wait until there is a comet of magnitude of 10 or less, to difficult otherwise.

Here are some examples of comets photos I have taken from my balcony:

• ../../my-astronomy-photo/my-astronomy-photo.html

If you want more information about the comets take a look at Seiichi Yoshida's excellent page:

• http://www.aerith.net/

Planets:

Are there anything else that can be interesting to look at? From CdC you can get Planet Visibility reports, from Stockholm in Sweden date 24 April 2018 it looks like this:

The yellow lines show when the objects are above the horizon. On top you have the time with noon at center. Only Moon and Jupiter is up when darkness. Jupiter is at its highest point around 2 am. From the main window we can set the direction to south and the clock to 2 pm and get this:

Jupiter is at its highest altitude in south, the high above the horizon is about 15 degrees, not much and make it difficult to observe Jupiter in detail but because of its brightness it is very easy to find if you have a free view to south down to the horizon.

If you have CdC installed, right click on Jupiter and you get a lot of information about Jupiter. The magnitude is -2.5, the angle size is 44.3" (arc seconds) at this date.

More information about Jupiter:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Jupiter

The red ring in the center of the star chart is an indicator of the scale, the outer ring is 4 degrees, the field of view about 120 degrees.