Here are the results of a little project I did on the evening of October 30th here in Tucson. Comet SWAN had flared up nicely so I decided to try to image it. I also wanted to obtain a spectrum of the nucleus region.
My Western horizon looks straight over the brightest part of the Tucson city skyglow, and the comet was already less than 45 degrees up when it became dark enough to begin imaging. So the picture came out a bit noisy. By cropping it and shrinking it down I was able to hide it a little bit, but if you zoom in on the picture portion it will be evident.
When I first looked at the raw data from the spectrograph, I thought I must have made a mistake because it looked so strange. But after a few days I decided to research it a bit and discovered that the spectrum is actually just fine. There are "Swan Bands" created by molecular carbon that are prominent in many comet spectra.
Click Here to see a larger version of this image. BTW the date shown on the image is correct - It's in Universal Coordinated Time rather than local time.
So the adventure continues. There are many many wonders in this universe just waiting for us to learn about them.
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