comet Holmes hot off the camera

[tornado33]

Hi
Just processed a 8x5mins pic with the 300mm lens.
Used the UHCS filter as well. Sky was very light fogged without the filter, comet looked much better with it.
Powerlines got in the left part of image

ISO200 used, on modded 350D. 6 deg above N horizon at max height.
Off to bed now
Scott

[iceman (Mike)]

What a great image. I'm amazed by what you guys are getting at such low altitudes.

[RB (Andrew)]

Excellent Scott !
What a great result, 40 min exp !!!

I noticed light fog and then got light wisps of cloud coming thru my shot too tonight.

[h0ughy (David)]

fantastic image Scott

[Sidewinder]

Wow, great picture!
So that's what it looks like now...I haven't been able to observe it recently, due to bad weather conditions (winter's rolling in). A shame, given the fact that over here it's almost near the zenith late at night!

Sebastian

[avandonk]

I am surprised how good the image is Scott considering that it is only six degrees above the horizon.
Well done!

Bert

[tornado33]

Thanks all.
Once the clouds cleared early in the evening , the sky was quite dark, we have dad days of showers/rain, so it would have cleaned out the atmosphere nicely. There is a rediciously bright set of floodlights some Kms away to the NNE, for the railway, casting a big orange skyglow upwards, but once the comet climed out of that, the sky background was not too bad. I kept imaging it as it transited, till it was about to dissapear behind a small tree.

I note there is now no trace of any ion halo/tail, possibly related to the recent disconnection event?

I had polar alingment very close, I was able to spot Octans and this trianglular astrism of stars that rotate about the south celestial pole, and rotate the RA axis and see the stars rotate about the same area. After a small tweak using drift aligning, I was able to go for each 5 min image without touching the RA.

The light pollution did cause a strong gradient that I removed with a combination of the remove gradient feature in Iris, and Gradient Xterminator plugin in Photoshop. Flatfield was taken using this spiffy new lightbox that Houghy built.

Scott

[Ric]

Fantastic image Scott, comet Holmes is certainly one amazing subject to image.

Top stuff

[seeker372011 (Narayan)]

I was hoping you'd get a shot off as you had planned...I went out at 12 30 but the comet was way too low for me -I have trees just covering Perseus unfortunately..so I have to find a better site. So still havent seen it-and now its not the weather at fault!