Wonderful clear, steady skies over Conon Bridge on 29th December 2007 and a wonderful subject to study - Comet 18/P Tuttle. I couldn't see it with the naked eye but it was very easy to spot with 10x50 binos . I also managed to capture it using my Canon 400D at prime focus through the Meade 8" SCT (with f/6.3 focal reducer attached).

http://members.aol.com/astrophotos/deepsky2.html#Comet_8P_Tuttle

The thing moves at quite a speed. The animated .gif was taken over only a 20min 45sec period. One of my friends worked out that it was travelling in the region of 10 arcseconds per minute.

Eric

A very nice shot and animation Eric, Nice color on the coma and yes it's very Fast i could not use the filter wheel because of the movement and the close-up very easy to see the trail. Clear Skies

That is a nice animation of Tuttle.

Its apparent motion is about 4.2 deg. per day; it's really flying. This will slow to less than 2 deg./day in a week, but daylight will be affecting things about then, too.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board!

That animation is very impressive! RickJ wasn't kidding when he said it was moving fast....

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Observatorio de la Ballona

I finally got it to load. I kept getting a message from AOL saying it couldn't find the page. After hours of trying it finally found it.

That came out well. Looks like you had some clouds in a few frames.

This is an application a DSLR or one shot color CCD is well suited for. It's a pain doing a comet in color with filters when it is moving fast! At my image scale its motion streaked the stars a bit at 4 seconds, I needed about 20 to get much so gave up trying to make a movie of it, even in black and white it wouldn't look good with the streaked stars or streaked comet core.

Not having one shot capability I've done a couple black and white comet movies, one through clouds of P73C going by the Ring though it was in the trees when it was by M57 so I had to wait for it to clear trees. It was cut short when it started to rain. How the scope and CCD were seeing anything I don't know. I saw nothing visually in my 10" scope. Clouds were too thick. I had hoped to do one of it going near M33 but it was snowing here at the time!

This comet doesn't have much activity in its coma it appears. But if one comes by that does you might try holding the comet from moving and let the stars move instead. That makes it easier to see if there's detail in the tail that is moving as well as showing the motion of the comet. First link is to the P73-M57 movie though clouds, second of comet Swan held steady so you can see the gasses move down the tail. Notice too the activity where the tail meets the coma. It narrows down during the 30 minutes of the movie. None of this was seen when I held the stars steady and let the comet move. The eye just didn't pick it up.

http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org/...57animated.gif
http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org/..._B3x3large.gif

Comet movies of an active comet can show some rather interesting features. I don't know if there's any activity in Tuttle or not that would show if you aligned on the comet instead of the stars. Might be interesting to see.

Rick

Thanks for this Rick.

I combined the 19 images into one "static" comet image using Registax and centering on the comet itself. I couldn't bring out a tail but the coma and its colour looks pretty good.

Eric

Great work. Lovely colour in the animation.

Kind regards
Matt