At long last...

Strange that the tail isnt as obvious in the negative. Though on the original there is a hint of the second tail below the comet.

Cheers,
~Al

James, those are 2 good shots
How do you use guidedog and dslr focus?, do you have to have a laptop with you? or, are these programs pre loaded into the camera?

Just some basic questions - but everybody has got to start somewhere

Keith..

Superb images James!
Well done!

How do you use guidedog and dslr focus?, do you have to have a laptop with you? or, are these programs pre loaded into the camera?

Keith,

I downloaded GuideDog from...

www.barkosoftware.com/GuideDog/

& DSLR focus is available from...

www.dslrfocus.com/

GuideDog is free and allows you to superimpose crosshairs on a live image from my LPI or other webcam. The software is ASCOM compliant and I can then send correction signals on a virtual joystick to nudge the scope in the right direction. You can set the sensitivity of the stick.

DSLR focus is a very powerful tool that I haven't bought yet as I have promised myself to stop spending money as a New Year's resolution (should last a week or two). It permits the user to accurately focus and operate the shutter on a Canon EOS300D. A simple mod for the EOS300D is a cable that connects from your parallel port to the shutter cable input on the camera that allows scheduled exposures to be controlled by the software. For now I shall construct a Hartman filter for the 300D and 200mm lens.

Hope that helps,

Have had time to look at my star map and determine exactly where Macholz was when I photographed it. Here is an updated image with the designations of two prominent stars.



The comet was travelling approximately NE and would have passed close to the yellow star to the right of SAO 93590 three hours later according to AutoStar suite.

As mentioned by albertw there was another tail like elongation southwards.

I went back to the original and made a negative of the whole image. Here is a negative of the original photograph reduced to fit.



I could make out another jet towards 5 o'clock suggesting that both features are a bow shock.

Finally, here is a countour map of the negative and we see more clearly the comet's interaction with its environment.

Great work there James,
you've fallen into a trap that I always fall/go into,
I just can stop processing those images, you can spend hours at it, entire days just messing around with different combinations just to see what comes out.

Its great, keep it up.