Finally caught it!
After days of dreariness, we finally got clear skies for some hours.
Comet is clearly visible to the naked eye, and clearly extended too!! Very great view through binoculars, it has become quite large.
I attach a crappy wide-angle picture taken with my little digital camera (8 seconds, ISO 400, 50% size and strong JPEG compression...). It seems to be brighter than Delta but fainter than Alpha, so about mag 2.1.
We also got 2 x 20 minutes high resolution echelle spectra with our 2m telescope. While the comet seems bright to the eye, the surface luminosity is already very low, in our seeing, it's similar to a 14th magnitude star!! Therefore the spectra are not really high signal-to-noise, but hopefully we'll get something out of them. A lot of absorption and some emission lines are seen in the raw spectra.
Looking forward to waning moon vs. halo expansion.
Sometime next week, we'll take images with our big telescope.
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David Alexander Kann
PhD student, Gamma-Ray burst Afterglow Collaboration at ESO
Thueringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg
<span style='color:blue'>Ignite our minds and let's burn brighter
These are the wonders at your feet</span>
<span style='font-size:8pt;line-height:100%'>- Dark Tranquillity, The Wonders At Your Feet</span>
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