Holmes 14P

The sudden dramatic brightening of comet Holmes 14P last month sent many amateur astronomers, myself included, scurrying to their telescopes. On October 23th, Holmes 14P was a very faint object (magnitude 17) in the constellation Perseus. A day later, it had brightened nearly 1 million-fold to approximately magnitude 2.5. Even in light-polluted skies, such as those over Los Angeles, it had become a naked-eye object overnight. Perseus had sprouted a new "star"!

On the evening of October 28th, I captured a series of images of Holmes 14P from my backyard using a Canon 30D attached to my Celestron CPC 11 with an f6.3 focal reducer. The sky was clear of clouds and reasonably still and I was able to get the shots before the waning gibbous moon had risen. Of course, the typical light pollution of Los Angeles was in full force. The exposures were 5 seconds each at ISO 1600 and were captured "raw", including a dark frame. I stacked and processed the best 6 frames using Registax4, followed by some final resizing and cropping using Photofiltre.

So much for the technical flotsam and jetsam. As I'm looking at the pretty picture, I'm struck with the realization that, here once again, is a surprise from the cosmos. Here is an utterly unexpected event that captures the attention of so many around the world, forcing professional astronomers to struggle for explanations, while the rest of us simply delight in it. It reminds me that, even as we learn more and more about the universe beyond, we are captivated, stirred, delighted and surprised more and more by what we find. Now several weeks since Holmes 14P's sudden brightening, you can find hundreds of photographs of it on the Internet - all produced by amateurs such as myself, from all corners of the globe. I like to think of us all as "Children of the Sky", all looking upwards with modern telescopes and cameras made possible only recently by the digital revolution, all drawn by our own personal fascination with the unknown.

One of many places you can go to get more information regarding this dramatic brightening of Holmes 14P is Sky & Telescope.