New Naked Eye Comet - 17/P Holmes

More on this here....

star.pst.qub.ac.uk/news/

And here's one of those marvellous "Earth to scale" photos that I so love

star.pst.qub.ac.uk/news/holmes2.jpg

Thanks Paul, but there is still no detail in any reports.

Have you looked yet tonight. I've been out with the bins dodging fireworks, and it looks much bigger and more diffuse tonight - its absolutely enormous (technical terms). I reckon a tail is becoming apparent to the right. Though light cloud and fireworks make it hard to discern in the binos. I'll get the scope out later if the night clears and try to get some more photos.

just managed a brief look at 50X in the 8" tonight before cloud rolled in. It definitely seems more difuse, I couldn't discern a stellar core at all, and It is absolutely massive. I reckon that there is an outer tenuous halo that stretched for the best bart of half a degree or more.

just had another look and couldn't be sure about this extended halo. Everything has a little haze around it tonight and it is hard to tell if this is real or high haze. Anyone else see anything similar??

looking for some more gaps in the cloud to bumb up the power

Here's some data, but these guys don't seem capable of simple math some silly errors in this, I think he means 228 million miles from the sun not 2.88 million.
www.thedas.org/holmes.html

That's what happens to some folks when the try to think in more than one measurement scale at a time 1 AU = ~149.6 Gm = 93 million miles.

2.44 AU*93=226.92 million miles - did they make a mistake when converting 149,597,870.691 km into miles?

Damn clouds - aaargh! :x

Must see comet again before it disperses completely.

Metcheck is forecasting about 52% cloud cover over Dublin on Friday night - that'll have to do.