Catalog of Nuclear Magnitudes

of

Jupiter Family Comets

version 2000

Gonzalo Tancredi ¹ - Julio A. Fernández ¹ - Hans Rickman ² - Javier Licandro ³ 1- Departamento de Astronomía, Facultad de Ciencias, Iguá 4225, 11400, Montevideo, URUGUAY (gonzalo@fisica.edu.uy)
2 - Astronomiska Observatoriet, Box 515, S-75120 Uppsala, SWEDEN
3- Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, E-38200 La Laguna, Tenerife, SPAIN  

Abstract:

A catalog of a sample of 105 Jupiter family (JF) comets (defined as those with Tisserand constants T > 2 and orbital periods P < 20yr) is presented with our ``best estimates'' of their absolute nuclear magnitudes H_N = V(1,0,0). The catalog includes all the nuclear magnitudes reported after 1950 until August 1998 that appear in the International Comet Quarterly Archive of Cometary Photometric Data, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) data base, IAU Circulars, International Comet Quarterly, and a few papers devoted to some particular comets, together with our own observations. Photometric data previous to 1990 have mainly been taken from the Comet Light Curve Catalogue (CLICC) compiled by Kamél ([1991]).  Most absolute nuclear magnitudes are found in the range 15 - 18, with no magnitudes fainter than H_N  ~ 19.5 .

This version of the catalog was published as Tancredi et al. (2000). The analysis of the size distribution of Jupiter Family comets presented by Fernández et al (1999) is based in this list of nuclear magnitudes.

• Introduction
• What is a nuclear magnitude?
• The data
• The sources
• Main categories of observers
• The screening procedure and the reduction
• Plots of Absolute Nuclear Magnitude (V(1,1,0)) vs  Heliocentric distance (r)
• Defining our ``best estimates'' for the nuclear magnitudes
• The adopted nuclear magnitudes and radii
• Bibliography

The full version of the catalog was submitted to A&A. A zipped postscript file with the preprint can be found  here .

2000-03-07