209P/LINEAR near perihelion

Comet 209P/LINEAR will pass perihelion on the 6th of May, 2014 (q = 0.969 a. u.). This arrival of the comet (third since the date of discovery on February 3, 2004) is very interesting and even exciting event due to several reasons.

First of all, comet will pass very close to Earth. On the 29th of May distance between our planet and 209P/LINEAR will be at 0.056 a. u. (or about 8.4 million km). It’s only about 20 times farther than a distance to the Moon and it’s one of the closest approaches of the comet in the whole history of observations.

At the time of approach 209P/LINEAR will move very fast revealing motion 25'' per min or 10 deg per day. It will be then in constellations Leo, Sextans and Crater.

Second, comet 209P/LINEAR can produce new major meteor shower. This event is not connected to close approach to our planet but actually due to approach to Jupiter in 2012 with the distance then being 0.6 a. u. The peak of the shower is predicted for (hope cloudless for us!) night 23rd -24th of May with radiant point from the constellation Camelopardalis in the Northern Hemisphere .

209P/LINEAR is a small comet and it is expected that comet would attain a maximum magnitude of about 11m. This will allow the comet to be found using amateur telescopes. But for now it is visually unreachable. Alan Hale was unable to find it on April 21.15, April 25.14, April 29.24 (near a 9th-magnitude star), April 30.15, and May 3.16. Unsuccessful attempts to find a comet were made by S. Yoshida (Japan) using 41-cm reflector on the 3rd of May and S. Szabo (Hungary) using 51-cm reflector on the 30th of April.

On images comet looks very small and condensed object with ion tail several seconds long.