Solar System 2: comets, meteors & minor planets

Sections in this page

Comets
Meteors
Minor planets

(2011 Oct 9: This is a reorganisation of pages rather than a completely new one, but it does have some new links.)

Comets

Here are links to pages for comets I have observed.

Beware of artefacts, even with high quality optics: When is a comet not a comet?

Meteors

Links to pages of meteor photos I have taken.

Minor planets

Asteroids are those minor planets which orbit in amongst the major planets. Most of the asteroids lie in a belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter but there are several other categories.

A quite separate group of minor planets are the remote planets, lying outside Neptune's orbit. It was discovered towards the end of the 20th century that Pluto was not alone out there and now several remote planets are known, some larger than Pluto. Pluto has therefore been demoted to a minor planet and because that happened fairly recently it now has the ignominiously high minor planet number of 134340.

Here are links to pages for minor planets I have observed.

If you want to know where to look to see or photograph minor planets, I generate charts for the brighter ones. The charts can be found on the web site of the Computing Section of the British Astronomical Association.