Terry Lovejoy is an amateur astronomer, from Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Lovejoy is known for his modifications to consumer-grade digital cameras for digital camera astrophotography. All digital cameras come with built-in filters that cut off infrared light. Unfortunately, they also cut off some of the red light that many deep space objects emit. After he published procedures to modify those filters, many amateur astronomers were able to improve their deep space photography.
In 15 March 2007, he discovered a new comet with one of the cameras. After confirmation by the IAU, the comet, C/2007 E2 (Lovejoy), now carries his name.[1] Two months later, he discovered another comet, designated C/2007 K5 (Lovejoy).
On 27 November 2011, with his third discovery of a comet, C/2011 W3 (Lovejoy), he became the first astronomer in over 40 years to discover a Kreutz Sungrazing comet from a ground based observation. This discovery also makes him the only person to have discovered Kreutz sungrazers both from ground based observation and from images obtained by spatial telescopes. The discovery was made using a Celestron C8 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope working at f/2.1 with a QHY9 CCD camera.
The asteroid 61342 Lovejoy is named in his honor.