- 1 - Light Curves of Comets in 2005

In this paper, I introduce the light curves of comets, bright comets or interesting comets with peculiar light curves, observed during a year between 2005 March and 2006 February. My web page "Comet Catalog" also introduces the light curves of comets, including ones not described in this paper. This graph represents the brightness change with a heliocentric brightness, corrected magnitude as observed on the Sun, in the vertical axis. The light curve of this comet was completely theoretical. It is already farther than 5 A.U., however, the total light curve can be expressed by the following one formula. The light curve is stable probably because the comet is a big one and the perihelion distance is not too small. However, in the case of many other big comets with somewhat large perihelion distance, their light curves are not so stable. For example, the light curve formula had to be changed on the way even in the case of Comet C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp) or C/2001 Q4 (NEAT). The following graph represents the coma size change, plotting the observed apparent diameter in arcmin, and the actual coma size as a multiple against the Earth diameter. This comet is a good sample to see the coma size change. It passed very near by the Earth