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!

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 :)

 

  

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Its been a funny couple of days.

The two main comet Facebook Comet Groups I belong to - CIOC_ISON and Comet Watch - have been suffering from a shortage of current images over the past few day. Many of us have been clouded out - even though we are fairly scattered around the world.

I did manage to rescue some LRGB images from Saturday morning, but they were shot through cloud layers, which produced unusual results. I displayed one of them on Neil Norman's Comet Watch and was surprised by the positive response - I think partially because we were getting withdrawal symptoms and anything new to do with ISON helped.

On Sunday I messaged Petri Kehusmaa ,who is responsible for the SON New Mexico Observatory, asked if he could take an image of ISON for me to share with the groups and he came up trumps, even though it was hitting the limits of his local horizon, and he had to wait until just before dawn.. What I also did not know at the time was the operational telescope had not yet had First Light. Here is Petri's First Light image of Comet ISON:

The weather now seems to changing and over the past half day more images are starting to come in.

Sunday Evening saw the broadcast that I did a prerecorded interview for and +Padma Yanamandra-Fisher did live (brave lady), This was for Under British Skies on Astronomy.FM . If you missed it and would like to hear it then do not worry, a podcast will be available in a few days.

I had intended covering a recent discussion on whether Comet ISON is starting to fragment or not! That will have to wait for another day as I will soon be opening the observatory. The sky is fairly clear, so providing there is no last minute clouding we will capture some images of at least ISON,

The BAA and ISON

A nice finish to the day. The images have been put on the BAA Comet Gallery, Denis Buczynski published an entry in the BAA Comet Forum headed C/2012 S1 ISON tail structure activity which mentioned both myself, Caisey Harlingten and the Searchlight Observatory Network. Finally the BAA issued an ebulletin which also mentioned the observations.

A couple of hours ago I took part in a prerecorded interview for Under British Skies. I suspect that after being up since four plus today's events I sounded a little punch drunk LOL.

Now to bed, even though there is still a hundred or so images to process. It has been raining here today, so there is a good possibility that when I get up in four hours time at four o'clock, I may find that it will not be possible to observe and
be able to go back to bed.

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 :)