yep very nice Paul and Jeanette glad you finally got a squiz at this one, and love the sub-tropical viewers feel to yours paul, the palm fronds really set it off great souvinir!
in answer to enquiries of the tail situ - this morning i saw a mind blowing stretched deeeeeep image posted by the legendary Michael Jaeger on ml, edit:found a link
I was imaging this comet 31.10.2007 by Vixen VC200L VISAC Cassegrain (200/1800mm) and 6Mpix QHY8 color CCD Camera. Scope was mounted on EQ6 and off-axis guided on star by my TVGuider. Motion of comet is slow and guiding on star is not broblem. I tried to create composition that visualizes all components of this spectacular comet. On the image you can see outer C2 band emission coma (greenish) and inner dust coma, with enhanced structure of jets. I took 15x3min images for inner coma and 4x10min images for better appearance of outer faint coma and convert them together throuh HDR merge method. Inner coma structures were enhanced using Larson-Sekanina rotational gradient and inserted back to original image. (note: Zdenek Sekanina is native of Czech - http://science.jpl.nasa.gov/people/Sekanina/ ). Images were taken about 12 km south of 100 thousand city Hradec Kralove at east of Czech Republic.
I'm not able to take next images, because there is cloudy now, and forecast looks badly for next day. If I'll have clears sky at comming days, will try to catch faint ion tail too, which this comet have, using fast newtonian astrograph.
Below you can see both native and enhanced look to comet.
Some great images from the north guys! good to see the comet is still performing well..
A lot of us in eastern Australia will be clouded out for some days to come
Well I got to see it last night and it is sure something to see
Picked the wife up from work and noticed when arriveing home that most of the sky to the north had cleared.. I hadn't a clue were to look as the rain and cloud this week has been pretty full on .A quick look on the net and its pretty easy to find..Starting in taurus with aldebaran three bright stars
line up as you drop down towards the northern horizen into
perseus, the california nebula nearby is the only object I recall looking at down this way before.. a smallish triangle can be made of the three stars down there , the comet being the one to the east if i remember right.. looking into my finder with a 13 mm nagler this object is already pretty impressive .. drop in a 28 mm for 46x in my 10" and it almost fills the view ,very impressive sight . I hope you guys down south get a shot at this one
even as it transits here its still fairly low in the north .. My northern horizen is fairly clean
and it didn't really become easily visible until aroun 1.30 - 2.00.
theres a lookout not far from home i might have to visit tonight that overlooks the ocean.
Finally got some time at the ep, been living in a hole called an office lately. I have managed to come on here to read about whats going on a couple of times, but as i said absolutley no time to have through the scope.
Obviously because of the excitment about 17P/homes, this was a priority, and it didn't disapoint. Took my first look at about 930 pm when it first showed its face above the horizon. Was very dirty looking and couldn't even get crisp focus. Checked the laptop and the best time would be around midnight. Had a look at a few other things and came back periodically, the view was getting clearer the later it got, (dew to a combination of its angular height and the fact that the seeing was getting better as the days heat dispersed). As stated the best view was around midnight when it reached about 21 deg above the horizon. This object is amazing, a lot larger than i thought it woulod be. Even the naked eye view, it looked like omega centuri and 47 tuc do naked eye. It is pale yellow in colour and dramatically brightens towards an offset center. Looks like a cotton ball soked in dettol.
Incidentally the sky put on another show last night. At 12.05am EST a huge meteor / fire ball thingy streaked accross the entire northern sky. Scared the heck out of me. Started as a normal shooting star and erupted into a glowing flame with a huge bright green, blue and purple tail. After the initial flare it died off and went back to a normal shooting star again and then erupted a second time and slowly got smaller until it burnt out. The whole deal lasted for what seemed like 10 seconds, although judging by how fast it was moving i'm sure it was much less than that probably around 3 to 5 seconds. I was gob smacked, was the most beautiful meteor I have ever seen. Did anyone else see it? I'm sure someone did, because many people would have been looking at 17p/holmes around that time.