Erupting comet Holmes

Comet Holmes, normaly an object unvisible to the nacked eye, erupted this week. These photo's where taken today. The white center of the picture reveals the dust tail of the comet. The green halo is the gas tail. Because the sun is "behind" the observer, dust and gastail are in line. Thats why this comet lookes so odd. The picture with the halo consists of 100 frames 0f 30 seconds each on ISO 1600. The dust tail picture is made of 20 frames of 15 seconds each on ISO 800. It was hard to capture the core of the comet. It was easely overexposed! Eager to find the comet yourself?

Data for 30-10-2007:

Comet '17P' Magnitude= 2.9. Best seen from 17.7h - 6.8h. RA= 3h47m26 Dec=+50°29.0' (J2000) Distance to Sun= 2.46AU Distance to Earth= 1.62AU Elongation=139° hourly motion: dRA=-24.9"/h dDec= 6.5"/h.

Or see the finderchart.

More colour in the pictures

By using an additional technique I'm able to put more colour into the stars. This picture shows x and h persei, a double cluster in the constelation of Perseus. I took 50 frames of 30 seconds and stacked them in DeepSkyStacker.

Longer exposure

This is the first attempt to make a picture with longer exposure time. For this picture I used 60 frames of 30 seconds. A total exposure time of 30 minutes! These frames where stacked with deepskystacker. Photoshop was used to enhance the picture of M33. This galaxy is a member of the local group.