Comet 17P/Holmes, 21.9 Nov 2007

Yesterday evening it unexpectedly cleared. A bright waxing gibbous moon was in the sky, but nevertheless I managed to obtain a fine image of comet 17P/Holmes again. Visually, the comet was still visible by the naked eye, but less easy than previous due to the moonlight.

From the image obtained, I measured the coma to be 34.0' wide (that is more than an apparent moon diameter) at 2007 Nov 21.90. This corresponds to 2.4 million km in reality.

Below is the image obtained. It is a stack of 29 images of 5 seconds exposure each, taken with my Canon Digital Ixus 400 pocket camera at maximum zoom (3x) on a fixed tripod. Below the image are the updated size diagrams.

(click image to enlarge)