This 3 degree field demonstrates the comets rapid expansion since the explosion on October 24th. Taken at our pristine dark site up at Happy Jack, both long and short exposures were required to reveal the comets superb details. The left image is a combined 31 minutes tracked on the comets nucleus, and thus shows short star trails. The core was still extremely bright at 2.8 magnitude, and had easily visible expanding shells as seen here in the 11x80 binoculars. The comets nucleus (single) is just to the upper left of the central coma. On the right is a much deeper image and reveals the extended green coma, and fan like blue ion tail. The tail was not seen in the binoculars, but the outer halo was.
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