Emission band and continuum photometry of Comet West (1975n) - I. Heliocentric dependence of the flux in the emission bands and the continuum

Gas Production Rates in Comets

“…Surprisingly the results for comet West (1975n = 1976VI) correlates very well with the ones obtained for the other four comets (see for instance Figure 2), and particularly with comet P/Halley (1982i) for CN and C2. This might suggest that Sivaraman et al (1979) tracked mainly the principal fragment (A) of the nucleus during their observations.…”

“…In the particular case of West (1975n = 1976VI) A -• C: 1976 Mar. 6.5 ± 0.3 (where A is the principal fragment and B, C, D are secondary fragments (Sekanina, 1982)), the expected errors should be at least twice as much since the data used (Sivaraman et al, 1979) corresponds to observations performed after the primary nucleus (A) of the comet had splited in these four fragments close to perihelion passage (February 25.22, 1976 (UT)). Surprisingly the results for comet West (1975n = 1976VI) correlates very well with the ones obtained for the other four comets (see for instance Figure 2), and particularly with comet P/Halley (1982i) for CN and C2.…”

“…As a part of the systematic programme -Determination of Gas and Dust Production Rates in Comets (GDPC) -going on in this laboratory (Almeida et al, 1989;Almeida, 1991), the emission band fluxes of cometary CN, C2 and C3 carbon bearing molecular species observed in the coma of comets Bennett (1969i = 1970II) (Babu and Saxena, 1972) West (1975n = 1976 (Sivaraman et al, 1979), P/Halley (1982i) (Goraya et al, 1989a;1989b), Hartley-Good (1985£) (Rautela et al, 1989) and Bradfield (1987s) (Rautela and Sanwal, 1988;Ojha and Joshi, 1989) are analysed. These comets are studied in the framework of the Haser model 1957) by using recently derived fluorescence efficiencies (g-factors) at r^ = 1 AU Almeida et al, 1989) and appropriate numerical parameters which are known for the more prominent species CN, C2 and C3 (Cochran, 1985).…”

Scanner observations of P/Halley (1982i)

“…known relation (cf. O'Dell and Osterbrock, 1962) (Sivaraman et al, 1979;Goraya et al, 1982Goraya et al, , 1984Goraya et al, , 1986:…”

Spectrophotometric observations of comet Hartley-Good (1985l)

“…A gross estimate of the total number of molecules of different species is made by using the well known relation (cf. O'Dell and Osterbrock, 1962) and recently adopted by many authors (Sivaraman et al, 1979;Goraya et al, 1982Goraya et al, , 1984Goraya et al, , 1986a: i.e.,…”