The sources

• ``Comet Light Curve Catalogue'' - CLICC - Kamél ([1991]). About half of the magnitudes included in this catalog have been taken from his compilation of cometary magnitudes). Kamél mainly used two sources for references:
• Astronomischer Jahresbericht for the period 1899-1968
• Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts for the period 1969-1989.
A large part of his data set comes from Green's ([1988]) Archive of Cometary Photometric Data. The ending date for
CLICC was Dec. 31, 1989.
 
• Magnitude measurements from the Minor Planet Center (MPC) data base for the period Jan. 1, 1990 to January 2003
• A few extra observations that were not included in the MPC data base but appeared in the IAU Circulars or International Comet Quarterly.
• Data from a few papers devoted to particular comets, published after 1990, have also been included:
  • Artigue et al 2002 [2002]
  • Boehnhardt et al. [1990]
  • Boehnhardt et al. [1996]
  • Boehnhardt et al. [2001]
  • Chen & Jewitt [1994]
  • Delahodde et al. [2001]
  • Fernandez et al. [2000]
  • Fernandez et al. [2003]
  • Hainaut et al. [1998]
  • Jewitt Luu [1989]
  • Jewitt et al. [2003]
  • Lamy & Toth [1995]
  • Lamy et al. [1998a]
  • Lamy et al. [1998b]
  • Lamy et al. [2000]
  • Lamy et al. [2001]
  • Lamy et al. Icarus 1999 [1999]
  • Lamy et al. Icarus 2002 [2002]
  • Lamy IAUC 6850 [1998]
  • Lamy IAUC 7000 [1998]
  • Licandro et al. [2000]
  • Lowry et al. AA 1999 [1999]
  • Lowry Fitzsimmons AA 2001 [2001]
  • Lowry et al. AA 2003 [2003]
  • Lowry Weissman Ica 2003 [2003]
  • Luu Jewitt Icarus 1990 [1990]
  • Luu Jewitt AJ 92 [1992]
  • Meech et al. [1993]
  • Meech et al. [1997]
  • Meech et al. [2004]
  • Meech Newburn AAS DPS 30 [2001]
  • Mueller [1992]
  • Mueller & Ferrin [1996]
  • Mueller&Samarasinha AAS DPS 33 [1998]
  • OCeallaigh et al. AA 1995 [1995]
  • Weissman et al. AAS DPS 31 [1999]
    

From these data sources, we have taken the follwing data observed after 1950:

• all the nuclear magnitudes and
• total magnitudes observed at heliocentric distances r > 3 AU.

Some considerations are presented in Sect. 3.3 to justify the deletion of some data. Table 1 presents a summary of the sources and a general classification of the data. The numbers listed correspond to the data remaining after the deletions mentioned in Sect. 3.3.
 
 

Table 1: Statistics of our data sets

Number of observations (1)	12977
Data taken from CLICC	2212
Data taken from MPC	10493
Data taken from other sources (2)	992
Observations pre-perihelion	6589
Observations post-perihelion	6388
Reported nuclear magnitudes (3)	7150
Total magnitudes at r > 3 AU (3)	4564
Scotti's total magnitudes (4)	664
Scotti's nuclear magnitudes (5)	529
Roemer's magnitudes	874
Lamy's et al. magnitudes	70
CCD nuclear magnitudes (6)	1341

⁽¹⁾ For consistency with other observers, the observations by J. Scotti reported as total but taken at r < 3 AU are not included in these numbers.
⁽²⁾ The sources are listed above.
⁽³⁾ Observations by J. Scotti and Lamy et al. are not included because those are coma substracted magnitudes
⁽⁴⁾ Magnitudes reported as total. We do not include in this figure magnitudes reported as total but taken at r < 3 AU.
⁽⁵⁾ Magnitudes reported as nuclear, in most cases Scotti has applied a coma reduction method.
⁽⁶⁾ Only the observations with medium and large aperture telescopes are included. This number may be underestimated, because for many observers we do not know which telescope was used.

2005-11-01