On the morning of September 7th, Comet Linear WM1 passed a fraction of a degree from the nebulous cluster NGC1624 in Perseus. I knew the comet was supposed to be around magnitude 12.5, but no recent estimates were found. Two images are shown here. Each is composed of 18 one minute exposures, which is the maximum length with my instrument that wont trail the fast moving comet. The top image shows what you get when the stars are registered, the comet shows the trail it left during the 20 minutes or so I took to take all the frames (including download times). I was surprised that this approximately 13th mag comet had a fine tail that points to the right in this image. I had just enough time for three RGB images before the onset of twilight.

The lower image, I registered the comets nucleus, to show a stationary comet with moving stars. This reveals the maximum detail in the comet, and its flowing tail. The stars are not colored in this rendition because they did not register with the RGB shot wich are points of light not streaks.

IMAGE 2

      

Instrument:  12.5" f/5 Home made Newtonian
CCD Camera:  SBIG ST7E w/Enhanced Cooling
Exposure:  LRGB = 18:5:5:5 (RGB Binned 2x2)
Filters:  RGB Tricolor
Location:  Payson, Arizona
Elevation:  5150 ft.
Sky:  Seeing 8/10, Transparency 8/10
Outside Temperature:  15 C
CCD Temperature:  -20 C
Processing:  Maxim DL, AIP, Photoshop, PW Pro.