"Follow that comet!" (updated)

Yesterday (Nov 15-16) around local midnight it cleared again, and with comet 17P/Holmes in the zenith this meant some nice photographic results again.

The comet is still growing in size, the growth being virtually linear. Yesterday (Nov 15.98 UTC) it was 25.8' large, as measured with ASTRORECORD.

Size measurements like these can be used to calculate the true size of the cometary coma in kilometers (that's a fairly easy calculation actually, as the distance to the comet is known). This is the result:

University of Hawaii astronomers recently used a 3.6 meter telescope do determine a size of just over 1.4 million km on Nov 9th: as can be seen above, my simple Ixus camera does the job as well as the 3.6 meter telescope in getting a similar size result ( I marked the Nov 9 size as I find it in the diagram with red lines).

Below image is the image I took last night (stack of 25 images of 5 second exposure each with the Canon Ixus at 3x maximum zoom), with parts of earlier images taken Nov 7 and Nov 11 put in at the corrects scale, position and orientation.

(click image to enlarge)

Below image shows a wide-field view. It is a stack of 7 images of 10 seconds each with the Ixus.

(click image to enlarge)