Clouds and comet and dome

This image was taken on Wednesday morning and shows comet Holmes which has continued to stay bright while it expands - if you could condense all the light from the comet back into a point, it would still be one of the brightest objects in this section of sky. The comet is just left of center. The Spacewatch 36 inch dome is in the foreground with a bank of clouds that are slowly moving into the area. This image was taken with my 24mm f/1.8 lens with an exposure of 30 seconds at ISO 400.

17P/Holmes

Comet 17P/Holmes is still putting on a good show. I mounted my camera on the front of our 36 inch Spacewatch Telescope again last night and took this image of the comet. The camera was in a spot I had lots of trouble getting to, so I had a devil of a time centering and checking focus, but I managed to get the focus right. I had to crop this image so that it appears more like an image with about a 500mm focal length since the comet ended up in the lower corner of my frame. Did I mention that the camera was mounted in a spot that I had trouble getting to? Oh, yeah, I did..... Anyway, the comet sits right next to the brightest star in Perseus - Alpha Perseus (Mirfak) which is to the upper left of the comet in this image. The comets nucleus is visible to the bottom right of the almost but not quite circular coma. To the upper left of the nucleus is a complex dust structure that is slowly blowing away from the comet, pushed by solar wind and if the image were deep enough, we would see a complex tail structure of fine dust and gas extending off the frame to the upper left. This image was taken at 190mm focal length with an exposure of 60 seconds at f/6.3, ISO 400.

17P/Holmes

This image of comet 17P/Holmes was taken last night using my 70-300mm lens with the camera mounted on the front of our Spacewatch 36 inch telescope - in essense, using our big telescope as a glorified guide scope. This image was taken at 92mm focal length with an exposure of 2 minutes at f/5, ISO 400.

17P/Holmes

This view of the constellation of Perseus from Tuesday night shows comet 17P/Holmes next to Alpha Perseus. The Pleiades star cluster (M-45) is at the left edge of the frame and the double cluster in Perseus is at the right. This image was taken with my 24mm lens with an exposure of 29 seconds at f/1.8, ISO 200.