2007-11-13: 24 minutes of 17P Holmes

[[1ponders]]

Every now and then (lately) you get a night that you are really glad you made the effort.

Comet Holmes: 8x180sec@ISO800@f/6, cropped from full shot (about 2000 pixels) and reduced to 1200 longest dimensions

Canon 300D/ED80/WO 0.8x FR, autoguided with TV Guider on Losmandy GM8 (not polar aligned so some field rotation between images)

Images dark subtracted and aligned (on the comet core which is why there is some trailing to go with the rotation) using Images Plus. Colour balanced and curved and leveled in PS CS

Enjoy, I did. ;)

[Garyh]

Nice one Paul! worth all the effort of staying up late thats for sure!
:thumbsup:

[iceman]

That's a beauty Paul, great job.

[RB]

Excellent Paul, excellent !

Glad you got a chance to image this beauty.

:thumbsup:

[h0ughy]

Awesome DUDE!!

[citivolus]

Impressive. Maybe it is just my monitor, but there almost seems to be a double coma there.

[[1ponders]]

I thought it might have come about from the stacking process Bill, but it is there in all the individual shots from 60 sec up to 5 min so I think you are right. I'm about to process some more and I'll let you know how they go.

[[1ponders]]

Here is one from earlier on in the night. Raw straight out of the camera and converted to jpeg, resized using MS Image Resizer. The brown to the right is my side fence, I haven't rotated the image.

The second coma is still there and there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with the focus nor unexplained movement in the mount.

If it's fine tonight and I can get the mount to cooperate I might try my 8" f/10 sct and see how it goes for a bit of high res ;)

[allan gould]

Paul great to see you are using the TVGuider. Did you also get the XY shifter? Did you find the TVGuider easy to set up? Before I forget - great shot.

[jjjnettie]

Nice work Paul.
Clear skies again tonight too. Whoo hoo!

[[1ponders]]

Thanks for the :clap: everyone. It was nice to get outside again.

Alan, we haven't been able to get the XYs yet. Some sort of holdup along the line. I did have issues initially with it using it through my Star-Mate, but once I bipassed that and plugged it directly into the handpaddle port (with a double adapter so I could still use it as a handpaddle port) it worked like a charm straight off the bat. Easy as.

[fringe_dweller]

AY yi yi yiiiiii!!! Paul!.. take that P17, consider yerself ponderised! :prey2:

[[1ponders]]

I like the one with the brown at the bottom. It's actually my side fence :).

Both these images are a combination of 8 images, the first one each sub is 120 sec and the second one each sub is 180sec. The second one is basically the same as the image opening the thread but taken earlier on in the night and with different PS processing. The first image hasn't had darks subtracted.

[bird]

Excellent images!

Bird

[Lee]

Fantastic images Paul.... :thumbsup:

[Dennis]

Wow Paul - gobsmackingly stunning images! Thanks for making the effort and for posting the results.

Cheers

Dennis

[RB]

You've got to send these into Spaceweather and the mags Paul.

:thumbsup: