This Comet is quite spectacular. In less than two weeks it has really grown fast, and although it has dimmed a little bit it's still shining brightly. I observed it tonight naked eye and could easily see that it was a fuzzy blob instead of a pinpoint star. I also checked it out in my 6.5 x 42 binoculars and was really impressed. 17P/Holmes was expected to be a minor league comet and would probably have escaped most of us, but the sudden brightening a couple of weeks ago made it a household name for amateur astronomers.
I took this image tonight using just 9 x 60 seconds in each of red, green, and blue filters. The challenge with comets is stacking them, but I think I got it pretty close. Click Here to see a larger version of this image. Compared to my image from less than 2 weeks ago, the comet is much larger. It seems that 17P has acted up before - in 1892, Barnard imaged it from Lick Observatory; it grew from 8 arcminutes to 25 arcminutes in diameter in just about a month! Here are some scans of the Lick plates:
-Nov 10 1892
-Nov 10 1892
-Nov 21 1892
-Dec 8 1892
By the way, I was supposed to go to a star party at the new dark site near the Chiricahua mountains tonight, but it was so cloudy late this afternoon that I decided not to go. It's cleared up nicely here in Tucson, but the satellite images seem to show quite a cloud cover down there so hopefully I'm not missing out. I was hoping to do a visual session with the dob, I need some eye photons! I did spend some time out back enjoying the sky tonight though. In addition to the comet, I've got the refractor plugging away on my California Nebula mosaic project tonight.
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