Comet 17P Holmes Jet structure

Hi all,

This is a first for me, usually my scope is pointing at the Moon but who could resist this spectacular target!

Turning the wavelets up to eleven has brought out some structure in the coma, the image is a composite of 2 versions of the same image. The gross over-processing was the only way I could tease out this detail, I will try some other less aggressive techniques and post here if it works out, any suggestions welcome...

http://www.pbase.com/slammel/image/88113343/original
http://www.pbase.com/slammel/image/88113321/original

Both images stack of 440 exposures 3-6 sec, green & no filter, Infinity 2-1M & 10in f4.8 Newt. 29-Oct-07 22:30UT.

Regards,
Stefan

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Pete Lawrence has suggested the Larson-Sekanina filter which is frequently used by comet imagers to bring out the jet detail. I discovered the demo version of Astroart has this filter and this is a screen shot of the result with the default settings, what an amazing filter! I wonder if it is available elsewhere or maybe I will have to fork out for the full version if I get into this...

Thanks Pete!

Regards,
Stefan


the squiggles at top right are from a couple of hot pixels - must learn to use darks...

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Hi Stefan -

Nice work on this. The moon will wait!

cheers,
Alan

Sweet stuff Stefan! 8)
Thanks for sharing!

more from 30th...

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and 31st, here you can also see that it appears to have slightly expanded...

- as you can see I still have problems with the hot pixels despite using a dark frame in Registax. It looks like it doesn't apply it to all the frames or maybe I'm doing something wrong?

Stefan

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