LOWELL OBSERVATORY COMETARY DATABASE

The database presented here is comprised entirely of observations made utilizing conventional photoelectric photometers and narrowband filters isolating 5 emission species (OH, NH, CN, C3 and C2) and continua. This work was initiated by A'Hearn and Millis in 1976 and includes 2020 observations of 85 comets obtained over 429 nights through the end of 1992. The total number of observations, however, is not evenly distributed over the 85 comets. The median number of observations for a comet is 6, with only a single observation obtained for 14 comets while there were 820 observations of P/Halley. The majority of observations were obtained at either Lowell Observatory or Perth Observatory, however four other observatories were used including an extensive campaign on comet P/Halley from the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory (CTIO). In this archive, results for a subset of 68 comets are presented while the results for P/Halley from this study are archived in the IHW archive.

Data and Resources

This dataset has no data

Field Value
accessLevel public
accrualPeriodicity irregular
bureauCode {026:00}
catalog_@context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
catalog_@id https://data.nasa.gov/data.json
catalog_conformsTo https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
catalog_describedBy https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
identifier urn:nasa:pds:context_pds3:data_set:data_set.ear-c-phot-3-rdr-lowell-comet-db-v1.0
issued 2018-06-26
landingPage https://pds.nasa.gov/ds-view/pds/viewDataset.jsp?dsid=EAR-C-PHOT-3-RDR-LOWELL-COMET-DB-V1.0
modified 2020-01-29
programCode {026:005}
publisher National Aeronautics and Space Administration
references {https://pds.nasa.gov}
resource-type Dataset
source_datajson_identifier true
source_hash 83ca12a74290f6c817cb07be2df2bec78f43806b
source_schema_version 1.1
theme {"Earth Science"}
Groups
  • AmeriGEOSS
  • National Provider
  • North America
Tags
  • amerigeo
  • amerigeoss
  • ckan
  • comet
  • geo
  • geoss
  • national
  • north-america
  • support-archives
  • united-states
isopen False
license_id notspecified
license_title License not specified
maintainer Thomas Morgan
maintainer_email thomas.h.morgan@nasa.gov
metadata_created 2025-11-19T20:40:10.859428
metadata_modified 2025-11-19T20:40:10.859435
notes The database presented here is comprised entirely of observations made utilizing conventional photoelectric photometers and narrowband filters isolating 5 emission species (OH, NH, CN, C3 and C2) and continua. This work was initiated by A'Hearn and Millis in 1976 and includes 2020 observations of 85 comets obtained over 429 nights through the end of 1992. The total number of observations, however, is not evenly distributed over the 85 comets. The median number of observations for a comet is 6, with only a single observation obtained for 14 comets while there were 820 observations of P/Halley. The majority of observations were obtained at either Lowell Observatory or Perth Observatory, however four other observatories were used including an extensive campaign on comet P/Halley from the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory (CTIO). In this archive, results for a subset of 68 comets are presented while the results for P/Halley from this study are archived in the IHW archive.
num_resources 0
num_tags 10
title LOWELL OBSERVATORY COMETARY DATABASE