We present the first evidence of a cometary dust trail in optical wavelengths along the orbit of 22P/Kopff, observed when the parent comet was at a heliocentric distance of 3.01 AU. We find that the surface brightness and the width of the trail become, respectively, fainter and wider as the distance from the comet nucleus increases, except for a region with delta mean anomaly . This suggests that the majority of the centimeter-DMA ≤ 0Њ .02 sized dust particles were ejected before the comet's previous perihelion passage and that they spread due to their initial velocity with respect to the comet. By comparing this trail with the IRAS data at wavelengths of 12 and 25 mm, we infer that the trail is composed of very low albedo particles (∼0.01).
We observed the optical afterglow of the bright gamma-ray burst GRB030329 on the nights of 2003 March 29, using the Kiso observatory (the University of Tokyo) 1.05 m Schmidt telescope. Data were taken from March 29 13:21:26 UT to 17:43:16 (0.072 to 0.253 days after the burst), using an Rc-band filter. The obtained Rc-band light curve has been fitted successfully by a single power law function with decay index of 0.891±0.004. These results remain unchanged when incorporating two early photometric data points at 0.065 and 0.073 days, reported by Price et al.(2003) using the SSO 40 inch telescope, and further including -2 -RTT150 data (Burenin et al. 2003) covering at about 0.3 days. Over the period of 0.065-0.285 days after the burst, any deviation from the power-law decay is smaller than ±0.007 mag. The temporal structure reported by Uemura et al. (2003) does not show up in our R-band light curve.
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