Friday, January 11, 2008

Faint & Fuzzy

Well - comet Holmes is finally fading and so I took the opportunity to photograph the "faint-fuzzy" for probably the last time. I obtained the image below about an hour ago from my light polluted backyard using the 400mm and Canon 1D. The image is a sum of ten 2 minute exposures at f/6.3 and ISO 500. A negative version of the same image shows the low contrast detail better. The comet is barely visable with the naked eye from my location now and requires effort even at that. The bright star left of center in the field is the eclipsing variable Algol. Bye-Bye Holmes . . .



2 comments:

Tuguldur said...

beautiful work Dave! :)

but the comet was really an easy naked eye target from Mongolia, just a few days ago... :D

Jim said...

That's a very nice image of 17P/Holmes. It isn't fading very fast - last time I checked, it was being estimated as total magnitude 3.5, but it's huge, so the surface birghtness is fading fast. Really neat to see how it looks the same, just larger.