Monday, November 12, 2007

Comet Holmes' Tail









Hot off the presses, my latest image of Comet Holmes taken last night. It is composed of 80 images at 10 secs for each image and the best stacked together. I then processed it in photo shop using the shadow/highlight feature to remove the whites of the dust particles to get underneath the exterior dust to see what was going on with the nucleus, I then increased the levels of the other colors to get a false color image showing the highly magnified nucleus releasing particles to feed it's ever expanding tail, isn't that just too cool! I put the before and after photoshopped images into a little clip above and entitled it, that's right "Comet Holmes Tail".



Comet Holmes is moving away from us now, and is also moving in the sky as well. Last night it appeared much closer as in the above image to the star Mirfak, and the comet will in the next few months make a semi-circle around the constellation Perseus. The best time for viewing is right now while there is a nearly new moon and the comet is still in it's bright phase, who knows how long it will last.



I signed up with Google AdSence, certainly not for the money but to provide a service for my guests. I was leery about the type of advertising they would supply for me, but the very first ad change my mind on that. It was an ad to purchase the newly released Apollo Hi-Res scans of the original Hassleblad lunar 70mm camera images, and get this you can get them in sizes of up to 3x4 feet! The images that have been scanned to date so far are kept at Arizona State University


Also on the site where you can purchase the framed prints is a Trailer for David Sington's directed documentary "In The Shadow Of The Moon". I definitely want to see this movie but it probably won't be released here in Saskatoon, have to wait for the DVD release February 12th. 2008. The film is a documentary about the astronauts who circled or landed on the Moon between 1968 and 1972. One astronaut said as he was standing on the Lunar surface looking back at Earth "I felt that I was literally standing on God's front porch" I am going to leave you with another one of my flying over Tycho perspective images. Tycho is the crater top center of the image with a Central peak.



22 comments:

kml said...

That is really neat, Bob. Great job with PS - the colors really give it a whole different appearance!

Nature Nut /JJ Loch said...

If only Mark Twain could see this!!! I think he'd be a regular poster. :D

Fantabulous Holmes Comet view, Bob!!!

Hugs, JJ

Bob Johnson said...

Hi Kathy, and thanks, it does give it a totally new makeover, it's neat to see it's nucleus up close and personal.

Bob Johnson said...

Thanks JJ and I agree.

p said...

congrats on the blog becoming savvy, let me know when you need a secretary.
thanks for adding my link :)

S-V-H said...

That's a beautiful picture of the comet, Bob!

These "astro-stuff" is so far away and you bring it so close to us! Thanks, I'm very impressed!

Anonymous said...

Hey Bob. Great job on the shots. Nice color manipulation on the second clip. And, as usual, the article is great. Very informative.
~JD

Bob Johnson said...

Thanks Paula, I'll have my people get in touch with yours to discuss the Executive Administrative Assistant Position, lol.

Bob Johnson said...

Hi Susanne, I'm glad you appreciate the astrostuff, it's always nice to know someone else finds your passion interesting.

Bob Johnson said...

Thanks JD, gotta love photo shop, all kinds of things you can do with it. It has made astrophotography a lot more interesting and fun!

MYM said...

I have to thank you bob...they were talking about the comet on tv the other night...and I actually knew what they were talking about thanks to your wonderful posts!

Bob Johnson said...

Hey drowseymonkey, no problem, you can now say you've actually seen it's tail as well, if it ever comes up in conversation,:)

Swubird said...

Bob:

I love the work you did with Tail of Comet Holmes. It was beyond excellent. Also, your fly-over images of the Moon are wonderfully captivating. Please let us know where to find your images in Sky and Telescope.

Bob Johnson said...

Thanks watashi alamo!appreciate the positive comment, I have a few images right now on S&T, they change pages day to day, click on the Comet Holmes link in the middle of my Friday Oct 26 post for one of them, if it hasn't changed again.

Anonymous said...

I also noticed one of your advertisements is for Adult Friend Finders- OPPS! lol

You are getting creative Bob. Nice show.

MYM said...

Oh I plan to throw some of the stuff I've learned here into conversation...make me sound so smart ;)

Thanks Professor Bob!

Bob Johnson said...

Hi Rose, like I said just trying to help out my guests and we all need friends,lol.

Bob Johnson said...

No problem drowseymonkey!

myonlyphoto said...

Hey Bob, you are really getting good at Photoshop, and making movies too. I think if you took all your images, 80 of them you can run animation in Image Ready (part of Adobe) but then in 10 second not sure if you would see any movement.

Google Ad sense, can actually will tell you traffic to your blog, indirectly, but by number of impressions. Make sure you maximize your number of ads, its three blocks you can have, that way you will get more impressions, they load fast so will not slow down your blog. Good luck with that, you should have fun. Yeah that what they all say I didn't do it for the money, lol, but when you make that one cent per day sometimes, the fever kicks in, its fun, lol.

Thanks for the update on the comet, and I had this great theory of mine, that it was coming your way, lol.

Anna :)

Bob Johnson said...

Hi Anna, I didn't know you could add more blocks, I'll look into that. Funny you should mention about the movie thing I am actually working on a Lunar movie to simulate lunar travel to Tycho Crater, oh well now that we can see the tail it kind of blows the coming towards us theory,lol.

Anonymous said...

It has been fun to follow the story of this comet's visit. I read somewhere that scientists had studied records of this happening with this comet before and thought that it had been the result of a collision of some sort.

Now that they have this episode to study, they realize that their theories about the event many years ago were incorrect. I guess it is a cyclical occurrence or something, no collision needed!

-Will

Bob Johnson said...

Hi Will, I don't think they will ever know for sure what happened , for one comets don't behave in ways we understand and this comet is about 260,000 km or so away from us, no probes or cameras out that far.