This looks worth following up :-) I tried to get the ephemerides from JPL/MPC but inputting DM001 is not recognised.  Any guidance on what/where to search for would be welcomed. 

Thanks

Helen

Thanks Denis :-)  for both the data and the reference

I have time on the Faulkes Telescope and so was hoping to gather some useful data on this comet - no chance of doing it from home!

Helen

I gave a talk to Newbury Astro Soc last Friday when I said that it was now very unlikely that we would get visual comet discoveries. How wrong I was! Congratulations to Don and the other independent discoverers of this comet.

An ephemeris based on all the available astrometry up to this morning is here. It was produced using Bill Gray's FindOrb. These elements are still very uncertain but it looks like it is heading to a perihelion in early December. It is currently moving south and the elongation is decreasing so it will become increasingly difficult to observe. From the UK it is currently a morning object amongst the galaxies in Virgo. The column headed "/sig gives some idea of the position uncertainty (in arcsec).

Any observations (astrometry, photometry or images) would be gratefully received. 

Denis and I managed to image this comet this morning from Scotland. I've just posted a very quick process of one of the images here.

Very nice. Hopefully I’ll be granted a half hour patch of clear skies in the morning some day soon. D

I believe Peter Carson and Andrew Robertson saw this visually with an 18" telescope from Suffolk this morning.proving that East Anglia does have the best weather :-) I am sure they will comment further.

Owen

Owen. Yes, Andrew Robertson and Peter Carson had a good view through Andrew's 18-inch telescope at Haw Wood. They commented that the comet was bright and easy. 

The latest ephemeris is here using all astrometry I have so far. I've done this starting 60 days before now and the positional uncertainties are now quite small. The comet has been at a small elongation for all of this time and was discovered when it was at its largest elongation. This is now decreasing. The comet has a small q (0.39 au) and is brightening rapidly.

Please try to observe this comet at any opportunity.

Nick. 

Official designation is C/2018 V1.

Clear skies this morning - 12/11/2018 05:08. Still quite bright, with ion tail visible.

Found this (!) frame in the set.

DDP tends to bloat the stars and make them furry. Here's a clearer image with the ion tail quite distinct. 12 x 10s, midpoint 05:14:30.

As Nick has said, the orbit is obviously very well determined. I updated MPCORB in Astrometrica, and the comet was spot on the predicted position.

Here's a quick process of a widefield image I took this morning with Denis Buczynski in northern Scotland. I'll do a better job of processing this later and put the result on my members page. The galaxy is NGC4753.

Am I imagining things, or are there two tails in this image?

This morning (2018 Nov 13th) the C/2018V1 is showing a nice long thin tail. My image is showing a tail over 23 arc minutes long extending out the field of view of my camera.

Also caught C/2018 V1 this morning with C8 Hyperstar and ASI183MM 20x20sec exp. Tail shows up on this reversed image.

David

Recent magnitude estimates indicate that this comet is not brightening very quickly and latest estimates put it around mag 9. It will get increasingly difficult to observe as its elongation decreases but please try to get more images and estimates as it heads in to perihelion. There is a good set of images in the Comet Section archive.

Peter Carson has managed to capture a much better image (see his member's page). Nonetheless, under poor conditions (wind ESE - straight from sea towards scope (!), and lots of condensation on the corrector in misty air) I acquired five reasonably steady frames. Comphot estimate: mag 10.4 in photometric aperture of diameter 130arcsec - but take this with a pinch of salt.