HATPI Pre-Perihelion Time-series Photometry of the Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS

Abstract

HATPI is a recently commissioned time-domain facility at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile, that uses 64 wide-angle, 9.6 cm diameter lenses and back-illuminated CCDs, yielding a mosaic field-of-view of 7,100 square arcdegrees, observing the night sky at a cadence of 45 s and a spatial scale of 19.7 arcsec pixel${}^{-1}$. In this paper, we present moving object time-series photometry with this facility, focusing on the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. 3I/ATLAS was first robustly recovered by HATPI on the night of 2025 July 2 (one night after its discovery) at a Gaia $G$-band magnitude of $G=17.796\pm 0.082$ mag ($\pm 0.030$ mag systematic uncertainty). The comet then increased in brightness to $G=14.071\pm 0.073$ mag $\pm 0.030$ mag by 2025 Sep 13, after which it became unobservable by HATPI as it approached perihelion. Before 3I/ATLAS achieved a brightness of $G=16.396\pm 0.029$ mag $\pm 0.030$ mag on 2025 Aug 6, it could be detected when stacking all HATPI observations from a single night, while after this date it is sufficiently bright to detect in individual 45 s exposures. We do not detect evidence for significant short-time-scale variations in the brightness of 3I/ATLAS after Aug 6. Compared to other light curves in the literature, the HATPI photometry exhibits a somewhat steeper rise in brightness with decreasing heliocentric distance, $r_H$. The HATPI magnitudes are well-fit as a power law function of $r_H$, with an exponential index of $n=5.167\pm 0.095$, over the range $2.14$ AU $<r_H<4.44$ AU, compared to $n=3.94\pm 0.10$ when fitting together with other literature observations. We find that the phase function is constrained to ${\hat{I}}^2=0.0552\pm 0.0032$ mag deg${}^{-1}$.

18 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in AJ