2nd December morning - Comet C/2013 R1 Lovejoy and C/2013 V3 Nevski and a little on ISON

After nearly a week of cloudy skies I had a good observing run yesterday morning :)

I first went to Comet Lovejoy. I was using the wide field 4" F4 Refractor along with an ST8 CCD Camera. This comet is getting better, brighter and clearer each time I observe it. It was discovered by Terry Lovejoy in Australia, this is his 2nd Christmas Comet and I will say more about him in another post. He is most certainly an astronomer's astronomer. It is visible to the naked eye and well worth looking for.

I had decided that I wanted to image the whole of the comet, which because of its length meant that I would have to take a series of images, starting with its head and working along the tail.

I took them between UT 2013-12-02 5:00:34.063   and  2013-12-02T05:14:50.329 . Each image has an FOV of FOV 116.5 x 77.7 arcmins - north is on the left! You really need to click on the image to see it better!

I took seven images.each 1 minute exposure - no binning - and overlaid them.

Using simple trig the comet as displayed is a touch over 5 degrees in length. It was not until I processed the images that I realised that I had not captured the full length of the tale. I was not able to do a retake this morning, so fingers crossed for tomorrow, but it will need this evening's winds to drop. :( If it is clear then I will do x2 binning but keep the exposure time to 1 minute. That will bring out the furthest parts of the tail. As this will produce smaller images it will make it easier to create the overall image. The comet is moving against the back drop of stars, so I have to move onto taking the next image directly after the previous one, (partially guessing I am moving the right way :) ). so that there is no perceptible change.

As well as the above image I took a series of shorter exposures of the comet head. These exposures are between half a second and ten seconds. I also took a colour image as well. These are still to be processed. I used a series of the shorter images with Astrometrica by Herbert Raab to get a N Magnitude of 8.8

The next comet I images was C/2013 V3 Nevski. It is quite recently discovered - 6th November - by Vitali Nevsky using an 8" F1,5 reflecting telescope. Vitali is no stranger to discovering comets. He, along with Artyom Novichonok, discovered Comet C/2012 S1 ISON.  When discovered it was magnitude 15.1. Fellow CIOC_ISON member +Charles Bell  imaged it on the 14th November and its N Magnitude was 15.6. There had been reports that it had brightened to about magnitude 10 however when I imaged it yesterday morning the N  magnitude was 14.7.

Here is my image taken UT 2013-12-02 5:58:27.454 - FOV 116.5 x 77.7 arcmins - north is at the top. The comet is to the right of centre. It is still quite small, though a short tail has been observed.

I then took a few of Comet Linear and I will put these on next time. After Linear I did try for a couple of others, but my processing has not yet brought them out. They were a bit fainter.

To complete the observing run I finally I went to the the Eastern Horizon to see if I could capture the poor remains of C/2012 S1 ISON, but it was too bright - the sky that is, not ISON. If the weather is OK I will trying tomorrow morning.  Is there anything to see? We just do not know yet.

Before I finish for the night I must mention a particular hang out that you may wish to look at. It is the Comet Festival South Bend Today I watched yesterdays and today's editions. They have good astronomers on there and today's edition - hosted by +Chuck Bueter had +Pamela Gay , +Karl Battams and CIOC_ISON's +Padma Yanamandra-Fisher  (heck I hope I have the links right - if I have not - sorry!). Yesterday's edition was great as well, especially as it had my favourite astronomer, +Alex Filippenko, on.

Is ISON Saying "“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”?

Even while the Wake is taking place new images are showing something in an area where we expected to see, if not nothing, very little.

SOHO LASCO C3 2218 

If you look at 11 o'clock next to the solar cut off disk you will see ISON - or what remains of her. We will not know for a while what we are seeing, though the professionals are putting forward educated ideas. It could be that there are a number of pieces have escaped complete destruction.

SOHO LASCO C3

Thank you +Tavi Greiner of the CIOC_ISON Group for finding these and causing a few of us to the East of you to not go to bed when we had planned to. You have certainly brought a smile to a few people as well as causing people to scratch their heads.

In the morning I will be looking to see what has happened during the night - if I can sleep!

The Comet is Dead - Long live the research

This evening I shared with other members of the CIOC_ISON group the loss of a comet that did not live to see whether it was to be the Comet of the Century, a label promoted by the Media, rather than those who have spent many months of their lives following its progression in its orbit which it thought started in the Oort Cloud only to see it destroyed when it came close to the Sun.

We joined, with many others, the NASA ISON Google Hangout watching the progress of the comet through the use of a number of space telescopes including SOLO and STEREO.

When the Hangout finished we all drifted off - many to Thanksgiving Meals - with many giving a silent toast to this comet that had become part of our lives. Some will feel that they have lost a friend, others will feel that along with a hole in their lives.

There still remains something, but whatever there is can be no more than a ghost of the comet. there will be the dust thrown off and maybe some small fragments. I, along with others, will be trying to image this ghost in a week or so, but even if we are successful they will not be the images we had all hoped for.

ISON may be gone, but the work has not finished. The many observations of ISON are there for further research to take place because in its journey towards our Sun and its dying our understanding of our Solar System will be better understood.

I will certainly be examining the images taken, starting with the days leading up to the image I took of the disruption on the morning of the 13th of this month.

  

Was this the start of something that the Sun on gave the final blow. I do not know, but I am think that this is an area that needs questioning. It was only two days later when something else happened.

These are quite extreme changes - say I with so limited an experience in this area. Soon after it changed again - settling down?

Now these are just three of many images of ISON that I have taken during the past weeks. I am just one observer amongst many, so there must be thousands of images out there from which a complete illustrated history could be derived.

This is one of the reasons that I am glad that I am able to be part of the CIOC_ISON NASA ProAm Group led by +Padma Yanamandra-Fisher . This is exactly one of the many things that Padma is doing, Creating a timeline of observations that will be held in a database that can then be fully analysed by the ProAm community she has assembled.

The Comet may be dead, but the research and discoveries that will come from the observations will live on long after the general public have forgotten ISON, something of course we will never do.

Clouds stopped play - apart from Friday

When the low clouds come in, as they did for most of he past week, it can be very frustrating in some ways, to see on The Net  images of the ever changing C/2012 S1 ISON, but it is exciting as well. Yesterday morning the clouds cleared, and I was able to take about three hundred images of Comets Lovejoy and ISON. This is about three to four times as many as I would normally take, the reason being is that with both comets being so bright now, it is no longer possible to take nice easy long exposures. Lots of short exposures means lot more work, so there will only a few to show today. This morning was particularly frustrating. Both ISON and Encke were in the same field of view, but again low cloud came in. The cloud was very thin, but because I was observing just above the horizon, the effect of trying to image through miles of thin cloud is as bad as trying to image through thick cloud. The first image from yesterday is one of a series that I took mainly to check on whether it was time to start serious imaging. Here is C/2012 S1 ISON just above a field of grape vines. If you look at the tree near the bottom it will look as though it is leaning. It is not. The field is not that steep! The image is at an angle, because the camera is always orientated so that one of the image sides is always pointing towards the Pole Star.
Below I have rotated the image so that is near the correct orientation.

I had actually started imaging a little bit early and when I get the time I will display the sequence.
Soon the comet was high enough to take reasonable images of it. Here is the best I took on Friday morning. Below you will see the negative which always shows more detail. Look at the right hand edge and the lower part of the tail.
You can see it below clearer.
and here is a blow up of the right hand edge.

Below I used a utility that makes the image look 3D. It is called a Rotational Gradient. This really highlight a disruption to the tail. One word of warning. When you start "playing" with an image whilst quite often bringing out some detail, it is also destroying other details. I always keep the original image safe and create copies to work on. It is always best to display the original image as well as the worked on one, so as not to cause confusion. 






















The above images were all taken using the 4" Pentax F4 Refractor. using the ST8 CCD Camera.At the same time I was taking images with the 14" C14 and the ST7 CCD Camera. I was using this to capture the head or coma of the comet. I have still not processed most of them, but below is one image.


All I have shown here are some of the ISON images. We also took a number of images of C/2013 R1 Lovejoy. I will start processing these shortly and then show them here, hopefully on a page that I can get the formatting to work how I want :)

 

  

v

Nothing today but most certainly More of Yesterday the 15th November 2013

After a few hours sleep last night I went up to the observatory to open up. The ground was covered in ice and frost and the clamshell was covered in a coating of ice. I pressed the open button and nothing happened - the clams were frozen. Pushed up on one side to break the seal and it opened. That was in fact the highlight of the observing session. By the time I walked back down to the house and sat down at my desk had sat down the sky clouded over and for the next couple of hours only caught a few glimpses of C/2012 S1 ISON.

So back to yesterday.

After Wednesday I thought it would be a long time before such excitement would come around again. I was wrong!

I had opened up the observatory a little late so only spent a short time on C/2013 R1 Love joy, (note to self must get round to processing those images). Then onto C/2012 S1 ISON. After moving the telescope slightly I took a one minute exposure to check I had as much as possible on the frame.

I looked at it and thought where is the second tail. Looked again and saw that there were multiple tails. Quickly changed the setting to a 3 minute exposure and binned 3- (basically that means that a 3 x 3 square of pixels is treated as a single pixel - bigger pixels mean more light captured quickly). Started to take the image - 3 minutes gave me the chance to make a quick cup of coffee :) - the image downloaded and I thought Wow! What has happened to it?

I felt as though I was looking at an old woodcut or engraving. Just look at it and imagine if  it filled the sky as some great comets have in the past.

I sent this image along with a negative to CIOC_ISON for Padma to look at and also to Comet Watch for Neil.

Negatives are very useful as they are easier on the eye for seeing the detail. To say that when people saw this caused some interest, would be an understatement.

From downloading the image from the camera to it being up for people to view was achieved in about ten minutes.  This enabled people to react to the change, either discuss what was happening or assisting in preparing to follow up.

To achieve this speed I do have to keep the processing simple. Flat and Dark frames have been applied, the background normalised, the image slightly stretched to bring out detail, in this case rotated 180 degrees so that north is up and then first saved as a positive then a negative and finally uploaded to the sites.

If you are a serious comet observer then you may wish to join CIOC_ISON and you are a Facebook user then click on the link.

While doing this more images were needed and I set of a cycle of LRGB image taking. This involves the camera taking multiple images, rotating through clear, red, green and blue filters. Twenty seconds per image. That was when the cloud came in and only nineteen more images were taken.

It was time for a quick cup of coffee and then shutting the observatory.

Between answering and asking questions I processed four of the last set of images to produce a colour image. Because these were short exposures the coma (head) of the comet looks smaller and there is less detain in the tail.

You can though still see the multiple tails an yes the comet is green. During the rest of the day I continued to keep uptodate with the comet, taking part in a number of discussions and a number of other activities.

These activities including sending images to the Comet Section of the British Astronomical Association . Later in the day there was a report and ebulletin issued.

I also produced a montage based on the last seven days activity up to yesterday.

Although simple to put together it went down very well with all the people who saw it.

I was asked during the day for permission to display a number of the images on various websites. I may cover this in a later blog.

Finally I did a prerecroded interview with Paul Harper of  Under British Skies
and this will be broadcasted on Sunday.  Although I will be talking about the comet the interview I was first asked about what is Searchlight Observatory Network. I only hope that I get it right. :) For more on the comet there is at least one other person covering it and that is +Padma Yanamandra-Fisher and I expect that she will be the highlight of the show. Padma is responsible for the CIOC_ISON Group on Facebook.

The CIOC_ISON Group is an a forum to provide support for professional and amateur comet observers to: share, discuss and collaborate on observations of comet ISON, as part of NASA's Comet ISON Observing Campaign (CIOC).

Well that is the description!  but it is a lot more than that.

Detailed information about the CIOC is located at: http://www.isoncampaign.org/


I finally got to bed twenty four hours after last in it.

ISON changes into a Broom Star - a quick uptdate

The weather was bad yesterday morning so no observing. It was very frustrating, people were reporting activity in the coma and all I could do was read other peoples reports :(

The comet is now naked eye - not by me :( I was racing to image what I could before the Sun came up.

Again I have been lucky and pointed the telescope at the right time at the right place and captured a change.

Let us look at the difference in how C/ISON has changed over the past seven days.

The change is quite dramatic. The first image shows it with a single tail, the next it has gained a second tail, the third it has changed a great deal as covered by a previous post and now it has taken on the form that one associates with 17th and 18th Century engravings of comets - the Broom Star. ...... and this has all happened in a week!

There will be more images later today. Click on the images below to see them larger.
.

Morning of 9th November

Morning of 12th November

Morning of 13th November

Morning of 15th November

C/2012 S1 ISON Is in outburst :)

It has recently been confirmed that the comet is in outburst.

-------------------------------------------------

[Isoncoma] Alert --- Comet ISON Outburst

Nalin Samarasinha nalin at psi.edu
Wed Nov 13 08:04:06 MST 2013

Dear Colleagues,

Emmanuel Jehin and colleagues (in visible) and Jacques Crovisier and
colleagues (in radio) report that comet ISON is in outburst.

Best regards,
Nalin (on behalf of Beatrice Mueller, Matthew Knight, Tony Farnham, and
himself)

----------------------------------------------------

It is nice to know that what we thought from my images has been confirmed.

If anyone does want to use the images from the earlier post they may, but not for profit and they must include the following information:

C/2012 S1 ISON 13/11/2013 at 05:30 UT

FOV 116.5 x 77.7 arcmins

SON@OSC (Searchlight Observatory Network at the Observatorio Sierra Contraviesa, Granada, Spain)

4" Pentax Refractor at F4, SBIG ST8 with clear filter. 3 minute exposure binx2

Observers Tony Angel & Caisey Harlingten

Copywrite: SON@OSC - Searchlight Observatory Network

Here they are again:

ISON and feeling happy :)

Just woke up from my siesta (well I did make do with just four hours last night) and saw on the CIOC_ISON Facebook Page :

ALERT: images from earlier today: from Tony Angel:
 maybe outburst - please image, take spectra ??
 Thanks Tony for the quick alert.... Thanks, Padma Fisher

CIOC_ISON: is the Pro-Am Collaboration for Support of NASA Comet ISON Observing Campaign (CIOC) via Social Media.

Click here to read Padma's article or visit the NASA Comet ISON Observing Campaign

I do know that I was not the only person to pick this up, but it still feels good :)