Urania

Comet 17P/Holmes (Wikipedia) is normally a pretty innocuous short period comet that is invisible except to users of large telescopes. However, around 23 October 2007, it brightened up by a factor of about 1 million in 24 hours, becoming a clearly visible naked eye comet in Perseus (assuming you have dark skies).

Last night, I went out to the Feder Observatory, our campus observatory, to learn how to use the new telescope control system and CCD camera. This new system is a replacement for our old system which became a mouse’s final resting place (details here). This new system is on our old reliable 16″ Dave Weinrich (our planetarium and observatory guru), Jack (a student), and I decided to target Comet 17P/Holmes. Now mind you, there are still collimation issues with this telescope and we haven’t quite worked out the focus vs. temperature function, but this came out pretty good for a first shot of the comet.