More on Friday Morning's Comets plus Saturday Morning's Comets - that quartet again!

On Friday 08/11/2013 I wrote a little about 2P/Encke and that day's imaging of it. Here are some other images I took that morning.

C/2012 S1 ISON

C/2013 R1 Lovejoy

C/2013 R1 Lovejoy Negative

C/2012 X1 Linear

C/2012 X1 Linear Crop

Saturday morning - 09/11/2013 - covered the Quartet - Again!.

First 2P/Encke. As there was a fair amount on interest in its trail I spent as much time as possible on imaging this before dawn came.

What follows are four versions of the same image. The first is the regular image. The second is the negative. The third is a stretched regular and the fourth a stretched negatve. In the final image you can really see the meandering trail.

2P/Encke

2P/Encke

2P/Encke

2P/Encke

Below is C/2012 S1 ISON.  This is still not developing very much, though I did see an image that was taken 24 hrs after this one and a second tail has now clearly appeared. I will be trying for this tomorrow morning.

C/2012 S1 ISON

C/2012 X1 Linear continues to be fairly bright after its outburst.

C/2012 X1 Linear

C.2013 R1 Lovejoy is really becoming the star of the show. It continues to brighten and is well ahead of ISON. Where as ISON is difficult to see in 10x50 binos, Lovejoy is now being seen with the naked eye.

I used four different method of processing Lovejoy to see if I could bring out more detail. I then stretched each one.

Process 1.

Process 2

 Process 3 

Process 4

All the images were taken using the Searchlight Observatory Network Observatory here in the Sierra Contraviesa, Granada, Spain at an altitude of 4,500 feet. The telescope used is a 4" Pentax F4 refractor and the camera is a SBig ST8 . All the images, with the exception of the cropped Linear are FOV 116.5 x 77.7 arcmins

There was no observing on the morning of Sunday 10th November due to my wife going to England for a week or two. I thought it would not go down too well to open the observatory while she was getting ready to leave :)

In the next blog I will include some objects that are not comets :)

A Kinky Tail or Trail? Comet 2P/Encke

I had a good observing session again using the SON@OSC observatory. Again I have been using the beautiful 4" Pentax F4 refractor along with the SBIG ST8 camera.

How many of us make a "discovery" only to find that it has been known about for some time? There is though the satisfaction of knowing that you have spotted something out of the ordinary. :)

I have taken a number of images of 2P Encke that have shown it unusual tail, but one of this morning's images really brought it out. I posted it on the closed user group on Facebook "Comet Watch" this morning and it attracted quite a lot of positive comments and likes. Some of the comments also helped me to understand what is going on.

Before that, here is the image that I "played" around with to bring out the detail.

and a cutout section to show more

As you can see, especially in the second image the "tail" has quite a few kinks in it. My understanding - and please feel free to correct me if I am wrong - is that what we are looking at is the comet dust trail (not the tail) - the very same that causes the Taurids meteor showers. 

Why there are kinks is another matter. They have been known about for over a 100 years. This is a report from the MNRAS 1904.

It was to be more than ninety years after this visual viewing that trails were first imaged by large professional observatories and it was not until 2007 that amateur astronomers first imaged one. There is a nice article in Sky & Telescope about it 

A Comet Caught by Its Trail March 15, 2007 by Mike Holloway

Well worth a read, but to get back to the kinks,  Were they caused by comet outbursts, solar winds, coronal mass ejections or even close encounters with asteroids?  I do not know. I will continue to image the trail and to examine again some of my other images of 2P Encke. 

This morning I also imaged C/2012 S1 ISON, C/2012 X1 Linear and C/2013 R1 Lovejoy. These will be published shortly.

Comet 2P Encke is an interesting comet for a number of other reasons.

It was the 2nd Periodic Comet to be discovered (Halley is 1P/Halley)

It has a very short orbital time - just over 3 years - which means that there is a good probability that I will be able observe it a few more times at least :)