More comet 17P/Holmes

After a week of very bad weather, it cleared last evening. The skies were far from perfect (haze, and flying clouds), but I could snap a few pictures of comet 17P/Holmes again. The comet is a bit fainter now, and larger, but still naked eye.

I experimented with taking images with my Canon Digital Ixus pocket camera on maximum zoom on a fixed tripod. The maximum exposure to retain pinpoint stars turned out to be 5 seconds in this setting. I took a large number of such exposures, and then stacked 17 of them to simulate a 85 second exposure (1m 25s). The result was much better than I expected, and hence I am curious what the result would be whenever the sky would really be good:

(click image to enlarge)