Holmes has a tail

Good to see you on the boards Pete ... I really enjoy your Sky Notes column in The Sky at Night magazine (and Dave's in Astronomy and Space also!).

Hi Pete,
I see softening of the inner white glow on the right hand side edge.
We saw this on Thursday night visually through the 20" and also suspected a tail pointing not exactly 180 degrees away from us was causing this, is that you are are referring to ?

Pete,

I wonder if I could solicit your opion on something;

In this image there are some fairly obvious arc shaped artifacts to the right of the nucleus. I think were all fairly weel agreed here that they can't be real. However dust bunnies have been ruled out. The image was taken on Oct 25 with a Lumenera SkyYnx 2.0 captured in 16bit mode using Maxim and processed with registax. I'm not well up with registax and wondered if in your experience you had ever seen registax introduce artifacts like these into images. I used the default registax 4.0 settings (fresh install) and just some wavelet sharpening.

I just noticed Damian's DVD drop thru my letterbox this morning. Maybe I should look at that first:)

Thanks for any suggestions you might make.

You've got some great images on that page Pete, Nice to see some more serious close-ups through a 'local' scope!

Hi Pete,

Good work as always. Aside from now having the first makings of a tail, structure in the nucleus is beginning to appear as well. There is a very dramatic RGB photo on SpaceWeather right now which highlights both of these aspects.

I am embarrased to admit that I have yet to observe and/or image the comet due to the weather (yes, things in paradise have fallen apart). It seems this evening I may get my two-hour window for a shot at the comet.

Fingers crossed.

The tail, I think, has always been developing since the initial flare up. It has become more pronounced night after night. The position of the nucleus has always been off centre and this is what you would expect from our perspective. Last night it was really apparent in some images I took.
I don't reckon the tail will be very long as it will only consist of material since 24th Oct. What would be really good is if we can persuade NASA to train some of Cassinis cameras on this - we have made a request but it's unlikely to ammount to much. However from Cassinis perspective it would be interesting to see how much of a tail has developed.