It was a little while ago now that Comet Holmes first came into our sights in Perseus. It flared from magnitude 17 to 2.8 in only two days and has since been picked up by many amateur and professionals alike, including a very recent Hubble press release.
So here is a collection of my favourite images of the Comet as it now begins to fade. We’ll begin with Sky & Telescope’s excellent finder chart for locating the comet:
On October 25th the first images of Comet Holmes were taken and the internet was buzzing with news and pictures. One image that seemed to really get around was this one from Cloudbait Observatory in Colorado.
We then started to see the comet expanding and getting even brighter. It was now clearly visible and many noted that it was larger than Jupiter in the sky. This animation from the Observatoire du Cégep de Trois-Rivières shows the first few days as it changed and grew.
In early November the comet began to change, now forming a tail. This striking image from Don Goldman from Nov 3rd shows that it no longer looks spherical and can start to be discerned as a comet.
Astronomy Picture of the Day featured a wonderful image on November 5th of a very long exposure, colour Comet Holmes. It was takenin Spain by Vincent Peris. It appears the comet has a greenish hue and a faint tail that is more pronounce than first thought.
As the nights get darker and the preparation becomes more intense, photographers are able to get even better images of the now much more comet-like comet. VC Astro’s beautiful Nov 14th photo is a really lovely example.
Finally in this collection, Hubble has been turned to view the comet’s nucleus. With its powerful optics, Hubble has taken high resolution images of the central part of the comet.
They have also put together a video which shows you the scale of the comet on the sky and so iI’ll finish with that video and hope you’ve enjoyed this small collection of Comet Holmes snaps. If you want to downloada higher resolution version of this video do so here. The file is approx 11MB.
