Astronomy related injury - (Comet Holmes through the 20&quot

I'm suffering from a broken jaw tonight... after it hit the ground in freefall when I got to see Comet Holmes, first through binoculars and then (and this is where the damage occured) through the 20" f/4. Ouch... and WOW!!!!!! :shock: :shock: :shock:

This is a truely stunning object. There is a near-stellar nucleus (like a very slightly defocused star, but not visible in my pic) towards the edge of a bright central (to the object as a whole) coma. This inner coma is then surrounded by a dark annular ring, which in turn is surrounded concentrically by a bright but diffuse halo. The whole object is massive!!!

I grabbed my compact digital camera (an old Minolta F100) and simply held it up to the eyepiece and snapped away. This image is the result of a three second exposure. The bright points may be stars or they may be hot pixels! The image is unprocessed in any way - straight off the camera.



The scope has a focal length of 2037mm and I had a 12mm Nagler eyepiece up the spout.

Wow!

Phil.

PS - there may be a problem with the link - the pic doesn't display for me unless I right-click on it and select 'View Image.' Go figure!

Nope can't see it either!!!

Saw and shot it tonight though, reckon its better than mag 2.0 at present and getting brighter.

I can see the pic Phil, although it might help if you reduce the size of the image.

Here is what happened when holmes discovered it in 1892
Upon turning the reflector toward that region,
he saw what he thought was M31 enter the field of the finder,
but when he looked through the eyepiece he saw something different.
Holmes said he "called out involuntarily, 'What is the matter? There is
something strange here.'

I think we can relate to this :lol:

Oops - forgot to resize the pic before pasting the link - done now. :oops: Still can't get the link to work properly, though.

Phil.

Ok... I think I've sussed it. I've uploaded the image to Flickr AND grabbed the correct URL this time! Have a look at my original post again and you should be able to see my comet photo.

Thanks Dee for the phone-tutorial!

Phil.

Hi ya Philip, this really is a WoW comet, even though your image has not been run through a computer software mangle, I can still see the pin point nucleus and the brighter area from that point.

More please

Deirdre Kelleghan
Irish Astronomical Society