International Comet Quarterly

News Regarding Comets

Special dated news items:

  • NOTE: The ICQ website has formally moved from this SAO/CfA website to EPS/Harvard; for updated information, go to the ICQ's new website.
  • The Edgar Wilson Award for comet discoveries in 2009-2010 has been announced (see IAUC 9158), with five recipients, for five different comets. [Earlier Wilson Award recipients.] [9/24/10]
  • The only ground-based-observable comets currently known to be brighter than total visual magnitude 12 are C/2015 ER61 (near total visual mag 9-10), C/2015 V2 (near total visual mag 10), C/2016 U1 (near total visual mag 8 on Jan. 12), C/2016 VZ18 (near total visual mag 11), C/2017 E1 (near total visual mag 10), C/2017 E4 (near total visual mag 8-9), 2P (near total visual mag 8-9), 41P (near total visual mag 7-8), and 45P (near total visual mag 11). [3/24/17]
  • Comets in urgent need of photometric observation
  • We are gradually making various articles and data of past published issues of the ICQ available here on the ICQ website.
  • The 2010/2011 Comet Handbook has been mailed out in Nov. 2010. Note that there was a delay in publication schedule of the 2010 issues, due to the move of the ICQ from SAO to EPS/Harvard. The January 2010 quarterly issue of the ICQ was mailed on 2011 April 12. The April and July 2010 issues are in preparation and should be published/mailed by late May 2011. (The July 2009 quarterly issue of the ICQ was combined with the October 2009 quarterly issue and mailed on 2010 Jan. 27.) [Other recent ICQ mailing dates.]
  • Special ICQ observing project.
  • Joe Marcus has made a prediction for the brightness of comet 169P/NEAT during December 2009 and January 2010 based on his work with forward-scattering enhancement due to observing geometry. His preliminary pre-publication text is available now at the ICQ's online-articles webpage. [12/15/09]
  • The sixth International Workshop on Cometary Astronomy (IWCA VI) was held in St. Louis, MO, USA, on Wednesday, 2017 August 23 (near where the path of solar-eclipse totality passed the two days earlier). IWCA VII is tentatively planned to occur in Spain two days after the total solar eclipse of 2026 August 12, and it will be held in honor of ICQ Associate Editor Charles S. Morris (1952-2025), who recently passed away.
  • An obituary for ICQ Associate Editor Charles S. Morris (who died in the third week of Januaury 2025) appears here.
  • Dr. Thomas L. Rokoske died on 2025 Mar. 9 at age 86. Rokoske was on the editorial staff of the ICQ (and its predecessor *The Comet Quarterly*) during the 1970s and remained on the Editorial Advisory Board of the ICQ until his death. For several years (1976-1978), Rokoske was the chief Editor of the ICQ (while Daniel Green was an undergraduate at Valparaiso University). [2025 May 2]

  • ALERT! We have introduced additional screening software to block spam e-mail, due to its prolific increase; it is strongly recommended that those sending e-mail to the ICQ or the CBAT remove ALL html-encoded text, as we cannot read such text easily (we do not use web browsers for reading e-mail) and such text may be deleted by our anti-spam software. (This means: send plain ASCII text *only*, *not* plain ASCII text plus html-encoded text in same message. The vast majority of ICQ contributors have no problem sending ASCII-only e-mail with contributed observations, so HTML-encoding is a natural place to attack SPAM e-mail since the vast majority of SPAM has html-encoding.) [11/14/03].

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