13th October 2006

These imaes were taken from my back garden in Manchester.

the images show he comet but are severely degraded by light pollution.

I tried various ways to image the comet through my 150mm F6 reflector and the smaller 80mm F5 refractor. I also tried combining these with a 0.6 Focal reducer.

I also tried various filters to cut through the light pollution but there is no real substitute for a dark sky, without street lights to kill the view.

23rd October 2006

While on holiday in the Lake District (Cumbria, England) I was blessed with clear skies fo a couple of evenings.

Left is a stack of about twenty five 10 second frames of the comet.

Not much detail but not the vast improvement in how dark the sky is.

All images are through my 80mm F5 refractor.

23rd October 2006

This is the same eveing as above but this time a combination of thirty five 25 second exposures.

Much more detail and clearly the comet has a tail. This image would have been impossible from home, with all that light pollution.

The image was slightly marred by fog that was slowly developing as I took the images. This seemed to waft in an out of the way throughout the observing session.

24th October 2006

Another clear night. This time the evening began with very transparent skies.

Though a noisy image because I have processed it hard to get some detail from the tail, this is my best image of the comet.

Detail is clearly visible in the tail, as are some of the jets of material eminating from the nucleus of the comet itself.

This is a stack of forty five 12 second images through the 80mm F5 refractor, F0.6 focal reducer combination.

24th October 2006

I tried t reduce the noise in the image by taking several twenty five second images to stack.

Unfortunately within minutes of starting to image, the clouds rolled in.

This is a stack of 4 images.