After seeing many photos of P17 holmes with the larger telescopes and near professional gear, I though: Why not post one with a little telescope? The "telescops" is a Panasonic LZ3 with at 6x zoom f4.5, making this a 8 mm aperture telescope with 36 mm focal length, but a 6x9 degree field of view. The exposure for the attached full field of view was 4x60 seconds at iso80, piggybacked on a Los Mandy tracking tripod, without guiding. The image motion due to pole axis misaligment was was only 6 arcsec/minute. The photos were registered and coadd with IRIS. Photoshop was used only to downsample to 1280x960 to bring the file size of the image from 4 MPixels to 73 Kpixels. Stars down to mv=+10 are visible, some shining theough the comet. Note that the colors of the brighter stars are consistent with the star color classification, M stars are red, B and A stars are blue.

The picture is from 14 November 2007 20:00 PST.
Enjoy the view. P17 is getting dimmer.

hha

Attached Images

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Very clear - beautiful! Small but mighty! Thanks for posting.

I like it! Holmes must be quickly becoming the most photo'd object in the sky but I dont think I'll ever tire of seeing pictures of it.

__________________
Beer, the cause of and solution to, all lifes problems

Yes it is a small telescope but with big great results. Simply welldone for your efforts. Clear Skies

I like it! That shot is especially memorable for showing the size and context of the comet against the whole background of Perseus, and gives a pretty eerie appearance to the comet. It might repay you well to redo this over time, as the comet's dust cloud expands out of the field of most telescopes.

Large fields are the only area where the amateur astrophotographers have no competition. A comet with a nice tail would be a better match for a 6x9 degree FOV. Repeat shots to come.

hha

Beautiful shot. It gives a great sense of scale.

Kind regards
Matt

Good Idea! It really show us how big the comet is.

Aw Yong

Looks like a zit on the end of the "Christmas Angel's" nose.

Rick

The enthusiastic members of astronomy club of Regional Science Centre, Calicut, India were very quick to make an observation camp on 31st October 2007 with latest technology camera and sophisticated telescope. The result of tireless effort up to early morning 1 am is the photograph attached here with. The photograph was captured by the senior astronomy club members.

Attached Images

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