Apparent Outburst of Comet 382P/Larson
Michael S. P. Kelley (U. Maryland), Tim Lister (Las Cumbres Observatory), Kritti Sharma (IITB), Vishwajeet Swain (IITB), Harsh Kumar (IITB), Varun Bhalerao (IITB), G. C. Anupama (IIA), Sudhanshu Barway (IIA) on behalf of the Zwicky Transient Facility Collaboration, the LCO Outbursting Objects Key Project, and GROWTH India Collaboration
We report an apparent outburst of comet 382P/Larson, discovered in Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF; Bellm et al. 2019, PASP, 131, a8002) data. Photometry of the comet in the r-band was 18.76+/-0.12, 19.17+/-0.22, and 18.74+/-0.15 at 2021 Sep 16 06:04, Sep 20 05:35, and Sep 22 05:58 UTC, respectively (all photometry is measured with 5" radius apertures and calibrated to the PS1 photometric system). On Sep 27 05:26 UTC, the comet brightened to r=17.84+/-0.03 mag. Comparison to an average of the three previous measurements suggests an outburst strength of -0.98+/-0.09 mag. The outburst was confirmed in subsequent observations with the 0.7-m GROWTH India Telescope on Sep 27 15:48 UTC (r=17.96+/0.03 mag, g=18.62+/-0.05 mag) and a Las Cumbres Observatory 1-m telescope at Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory on Sep 27 23:50 (r=17.87+/-0.02 mag). At the time of the outburst discovery, the comet was 4.48 au from the Sun and 3.72 au from the Earth. The comet's next perihelion occurs in March 2022.

Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST-2034437 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, Weizmann Institute for Science, Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, University of Maryland, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Trinity College Dublin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and IN2P3, France. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW.

This work makes use of observations from the Las Cumbres Observatory global telescope network.

The GROWTH India Telescope (GIT) is a 70-cm telescope with a 0.7 degree field of view, set up by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) with funding from DST-SERB and IUSSTF. It is located at the Indian Astronomical Observatory (Hanle), operated by IIA. We acknowledge funding by the IITB alumni batch of 1994, which partially supports operations of the telescope. Telescope technical details are available at https://sites.google.com/view/growthindia/
optical,comet,the sun,transient