ASTRO: Holmes

Finally some available time and some clear sky. Wind and clouds were racing
through the sky, and sometimes rain, but there was almost 30 minutes of very
clear sky tonight. I was anticipating this, as it was like this all day. I
assembled my EQ2, Willam Optics Z80 and EOS350D to be ready to take
advantage of any clear sky this evening (I figured using my ATIK 16HRC and
laptop would take too much time).

then the sky was clear, transparancy was great, the sky was really 'clean'
(probably due to the strong wind) and I went outside, setup my Z80, very
roughly polar aligning it, looked at the comet for some time. this is
fantastic object, before, I only looked at it through my handheld 10x60
binoculars.

Then I connected my 350D, focussed while looking through the finder and took
a lot of 30s exposures. The EQ2 and drive is not a great imaging
platform....

This is a single 30s exposure and shows some tracking errors. I did some
blurring and sharpening after cropping. I am happy to have captured this
comet myself, after looking at so many images on the net.....

--
Martijn
www.xs4all.nl/~martlian

md wrote ...

Martijn,

It looks good to me! Holmes continues to evolve!

George N