January - ARO is back in full operation - the dead laptop was replaced with a newer one!

April 25 - Here is a "movie" of Comet C/2019 Y4 (Atlas) taken at the Abbey Ridge Observatory. Each frame was made from images taken on the nights of April 17/18, 19/20, and 23/24. Each sequence was about 4 hours of one minute images. Each 6th image on each night was used to make a single image with the background stars removed (median filter - the slight diagonal streaking is an artifact of that).

On the first image, you should notice the fragmented comet nucleus that I posted a few days ago. The next frame taken two days later shows less debris behind the main nucleus. In the last frame, four days later, the debris is gone and the nucleus glow is smaller.

Another thing to take note of is that the angle of the tail changes from frame to frame - this is due to the changing Sun-Earth-Comet angles as Earth and the comet move through the solar system.