Report on the Kiso cometary dust trail survey

Abstract

Cometary dust trails were first observed by IRAS; they are widely known to be the origins of meteoric showers. A new window has been opened for the study of dust trails, using ground-based observations. We succeeded in obtaining direct images of the 22P/Kopff dust trail with the Kiso 1.05-m Schmidt telescope. Following this initial success, we have continued to perform a dust trail survey at Kiso. As a result of this survey, we have detected dust trails along the orbit of six periodic comets, between February 2002 and March 2004. The optical depth of these dust trails are 10 −9 to 10 −8, which is consistent with IRAS measurements. In this paper, we describe the observations and data reduction procedures, and report the brief result obtained between February 2002 and March 2004.