Siding Spring
The comet was discovered on 3 January 2013 by professional astronomer Robert McNaught at the Siding Spring Observatory at Coonabarabran NSW Australia and received the official designation C/2013 A1. It was named Siding Spring based on a tradition to identify the observatory that discovered it. Three images were obtained through the use of a CCD camera mounted on the Uppsala Southern Schmidt Telescope with a spherical mirror of 0.5 meters in diameter. Comet Siding Spring had an apparent magnitude of 18.4 to 18.6. At the time of its discovery, it was from the Sun.