Bibcode
Tancredi, G.; Fernández, J. A.; Rickman, H.; Licandro, J.
Bibliographical reference
Astronomy and Astrophysics Supplement, v.146, p.73-90
Advertised on:
10
2000
Citations
77
Refereed citations
70
Description
A catalog of a sample of 105 Jupiter family (JF) comets (defined as
those with Tisserand constants T > 2 and orbital periods P < 20
yr) is presented with our ``best estimates'' of their absolute nuclear
magnitudes H_N = V(1,0,0). The catalog includes all the nuclear
magnitudes reported after 1950 until August 1998 that appear in the
International Comet Quarterly Archive of Cometary Photometric Data, the
Minor Planet Center (MPC) data base, IAU Circulars, International Comet
Quarterly, and a few papers devoted to some particular comets, together
with our own observations. Photometric data previous to 1990 have mainly
been taken from the Comet Light Curve Catalogue (CLICC) compiled by
Kamél (cite{kamel}). We discuss the reliability of the reported
nuclear magnitudes in relation to the inherent sources of errors and
uncertainties, in particular the coma contamination often present even
at large heliocentric distances. A large fraction of the JF comets of
our sample indeed shows various degrees of activity at large
heliocentric distances, which is correlated with recent downward jumps
in their perihelion distances. The reliability of coma subtraction
methods to compute the nuclear magnitude is also discussed. Most
absolute nuclear magnitudes are found in the range 15 - 18, with no
magnitudes fainter than H_N ~ 19.5. The catalog can be found at:
http://www.fisica.edu.uy/ ~ gonzalo/catalog/. Table 2 and Appendix B are
only available in electronic form at http://www.edpsciences.org Table 5
is also available in electronic form at the CDS via anonymous ftp to
cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (130.79.128.5) or via
http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/Abstract.html