Review By Christof Wiedemair

“I had the great pleasure to work with Vikrant from Cepheid observatory India on the measurement of the parallax of the comet 46P/Wirtanen some time ago. He is a very kind person and he agreed to help us with our task right away. The data he contributed were very precise and so the result turned out accurately, too. Since then, I follow the activities of the Cepheid observatory group on their website and am always very impressed by their high versatility and their diligence. Keep it up, Vikrant & friends!”


Christof Wiedemair (Italy) teaches maths and physics at the “Nikolaus Cusanus” high school in Bruneck, South Tyrol, Italy. With a group of enthusiastic students he carried out a lot of astronomical observations and projects during the last twelve years with great success, thus winning also several international competitions.

To learn more about the group @astrocusanus visit astrocusanus.blogspot.com

Christof Wiedemair

Comet C/2013 X1 PanSTARRS

We carried out the spectroscopy of Comet C/2013 X1 PanSTARRS (Vmag = +9.67) as on 2016.01.09, using LHIRES-III spectrograph (23µm long slit, R=700, Angstrom /Pixel (A/P) =3.0) fixed on 0.20m SCT. The spectral image captured using Atik460ex cooled monochrome CCD coupled with LHIRES-III spectrograph. The image guided over spectrograph slit using Atik 383L+ monochrome CCD to get better S/N ratio. Comet seems enriched with C2,C2,CH+ & CN.
The spectral data corrected for instrument response and normalized. We used following software for different purposes.
APT Tool: LHIRES guiding/Histogram/Capture
Telescope control: Starry Night pro7 + EQMOD
CCDstack2.0: Image calibration
RSpec: Spectroscopy
Cepheids Astronomy Group, RBT, India.

Comet C/2013 US10 Catalina

We carried out the spectroscopy of comet C/2013 US10 Catalina (Vmag = +6.1) as on 20th December-2015, using LHIRES-III spectrograph (23µm long slit, R=700, Angstrom /Pixel (A/P) =3.0) fixed on 0.20m SCT. The spectral image captured using Atik460ex cooled monochrome CCD coupled with LHIRES-III spectrograph. The image guided over spectrograph slit using Atik 383L+ monochrome CCD to get better S/N ratio. Comet seems enriched with C2,C2,CH+,CO+ & CN.
The spectral data corrected for instrument response and normalized. We used following software for different purposes.
APT Tool: LHIRES guiding/Histogram/Capture
Telescope control: Starry Night pro7 + EQMOD
CCDstack2.0: Image calibration
RSpec: Spectroscopy
Cepheids Astronomy Group, RBT, India.