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My discovery was a co-discovery with an astronomer from Poland (Szymon Liwo) wherein we found a new comet which belonged to Kreutz group family. 85% of these sun-grazing comets belong to this family. Shishir Deshmukh has 6 such comets under his name.
A co-discovery is given credit only when the same comet is discovered by two different people within 20 seconds time gap.
On 13th Dec 2011, Szymon posted this comet on 11:37:16....I posted the same comet on 11:37:26 (I was late by 11seconds).
I wrote to Karl Battams, who works in Naval Research Lab in Washington, mainly responsible to provide confirmations for such sun-grazing comets.A positive confirmation from Karl and confirmation on SOHO comet hunter page made me the second Indian.
Sun-grazing comets are typically very small comets. They too are bound by laws of physics and always move in a near perfect straight line heading towards Sun, with a near constant speed,size,shape and brightness !!
Finding and discovering such sun-grazing comets is a pain. It requires hours and hours of observations using images provided by LASCO cornograph instrument which is on-board SOHO . All over the world there are many experienced comet hunters who post a possible comet within seconds and we fail to catch them up.
I was doing a basic astronomy course from Mumbai University. In December 2010, Shishir gave us a lecture on Solar Eclipses and last 10 minutes on his SOHO comet discovery. I got inspired and started my search in January 2011..Finally on December 13th, i found a comet.Gave a call to Shishir. He already knew that i had discovered one !!
Feels proud to be an Indian and happy that our country is progressing in this field.Still we are far behind compared to countries like U.S,Europe and China. Khagol Mandal being an organization in field of astronomy is doing a tremendous work. And because of you people there are many young talended students who take this science hobby with passion.
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