Observations of comet Vales P/2010H2

Published on Friday 16 April 2010

Observations from April 16th 2010.

Observations from May3rd 2010.

Observations from April 16th 2010.

Then the comet was only known through a temporary denomination 4F0011.

That night, the sky was not photometric (I could not observe for microfun). A second series of images not shown here was partially covered (cirruses).

C14 F/1.96 (hyperstar focus), QHY9 unfiltered camera, 1.6" per pixel scale.

60 1 min exposure, preprocessed and stacked with PRISM software. Time at mid exposure : April 17th 2010, 06h09m42s

Here is an image of the object, stack recentered on the object, shown here enlarged twice :

Here is an image recentered on the field's stars, shown to exactly the same thresholds, to show the difference :

I can clearly state that there is a faint coma around the object. The coma is about 50 pixels large, therefore about 1.3 arc minute wide

Here is a very high contrast rendition :

Observations from May 3rd 2010

The full moon has passed.

Same equipment as before, 3 hours of exposures. the comet's coma has grown

This is a normal rendition of the image. There are several asteroids in the field.

Here is a false color rendition of a gaussian histogram equalization.

This is a high contrast rendition, showing that the coma extends to 4.5 arc minutes now (this image is not enlarged, not like the pictures from April 16th)

This is an image made with a rotational gradient filtering (20°) showing 4 jets around the nucleus. Unfortunately during the exposures a faint star crossed the comet nucleus.

Share this page