Comet Holmes 17p

These images taken of Comet Holmes on Sunday Night 11th November with the ST80 telescope and Canon 350D camera - wonderful!
The comet is gradually becoming bigger but more transparent, you can clearly see stars through the coma and the colour is stunning. Apparantly, Comet Holmes lost it's short tail a couple of days ago, but even then it was difficult to image. I think the bow of the comet is facing the Earth and the tail (what there is of it) is trailing behind.
Comet Holmes has reached a diameter of 1.4 million Kilometres, this makes it the biggest object in the solar system, bigger than the Sun in size but not mass.

Latest M33 and M74

M33 Pinwheel Galaxy and M74 Phantom Galaxy

Beautiful clear night on Sunday, crisp and frosty!

I wanted to try again at M33 with the ST80 and 1 minute exposures. I can't really go further than that with the mount because of star rotation. I'm not sure if Deepspacestacker will correct larger rotations.

Much more detail than my previous attempts, but I can't bring out the colour, probably because longer exposures are still needed. Still..i'm still amazed that I can capture this galaxy at all!

I am even more amazed to capture an image of M74 galaxy! This feint little object close to M33 has a magnitude greater than 10.0. Cannot even see it visually! You can see the shape of this spiral galaxy, but not much detail...i'm dead pleased with it though!

I've got to say that the Celestron SLR GoTo mount is brilliant, no way would I be able to find thse objects with my Skywatcher 130m. They are face-on spiral galaxies and are a sod to find!

Frogspawn in Space?

Another image of Comet Holmes 17p taken on 8th November.

This time I used 30s exposures with the Canon 350D and 200mm lens. Stars are streaking and there is movement from the Comet, but a nice image!

Comet Holmes has grown in size, but has become more diffuse. It can be seen easily with the naked eye but I also had a look with the Skywatcher 130...WoW! It is enormous...the Comet completely filled the FOV with a 17mm eyepiece. This is the biggest Comet since Halley-Bopp back in 1997!

Fireworks in space!

I like this image of Comet Holmes...this image produced from two lots of images stacked in Deepskystacker (DSS)
A spectacular object and now larger than any planet! Whatever caused the outburst of this comet is better than any terestial firework on bonfire night!
Since becoming interested in Astro-imaging i'm amazed at the number of comets that are about and can be seen from Earth, this one without a telescope. It's just knowing where to look. I'm surprised that this comet has not had a mention on television, it is so easy to see!
Happy Birthday Website!!!
My website has now been running for two years and I have had more than five thousand hits! (alright...a lot of them mine) ...but when I look at the statistics I can see that I have had hits from all round the world...brilliant!

Comet Holmes 17p

A couple of nice images taken myself last night of Comet Holmes.

Amid the pops and bangs of fireworks I managed to take some images of the comet with my Canon 350D on a tripod with the 200mm zoom lens. Although the sky was clear, there was a lot of smoke and mist in the air. The widefield view was taken with the 200mm zoom lens set at 50mm while the close up view was taken with the zoom lens set at 200mm.
I would like to try imaging the comet with the ST80, but I will wait for a clearer night!