Movement and coma size increase of 17P/Holmes visualized

Below image is a combination of photographs I took on two different nights just over a week apart. It clearly demonstrates not only the movement of comet 17P/Holmes amongst the stars, but also the increase in the size of it's coma.

(click image to enlarge)

Yet more comet 17P/Holmes

Late last evening (around local midnight)it cleared again, and unlike two days earlier this time the sky quality was good. 17P/Holmes was an easy object for the naked eye, even from the center of Leiden.

So I repeated the experiment with 5 second exposures from a fixed tripod with my Canon Digital Ixus 400 compact camera at maximum zoom. The result is much better than the previous attempt a few days ago. This image, a stack of 16 photographs exposed 5 seconds each, highly satisfies me!

(click image to enlarge)

I also took a number of 10 second wide field images again. Below image shows (a part of) a stack of 8 wide field images, 10 second exposure each. The full constellation of Perseus is visible, with the comet as a bright yellowish object just above the alpha Persei association.

(click image to enlarge)

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)

Comet 17P/Holmes

After a long period of cloudy skies, it finally cleared last evening. Not in time to catch satellites, but in time to catch comet 17P/Holmes.

Comet 17P/Holmes dramatically brightened a week ago, from mag. +16 (!) to mag +2.5 (!!). That is spectacular and no other comet is known to do this this dramatically.

Yesterday the skies cleared only after the moon was already up. Nevertheless, and nothwithstanding my location in the middle of a town center, I could easily spot the comet with the naked eye as a bright "fuzzy" star just east of the alpha Persei group. In my 20 x 80 binoculars, it was a very bright nebulous globe. There is no sign of a tail, only a round coma some 20 arcminutes in size.

In wide field pictures, the object appears stellar due to this reason. Below image is a "stack" of three 10.7s images with my Canon Digital Ixus 400 pocket camera on a fixed tripod (so no guiding).

(click image to enlarge to full size)