Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, new images with dust waves – 7 Mar. 2024

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks continues to amaze us, showing stunning details both in its tail and inner coma. We are pleased to share these new images.

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks: 7 Mar. 2024.

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks: 7 Mar. 2024.

The image above comes from the sigma clipping combination of 13, 120-second unfiltered exposures, unguided, taken with the ARTEC250+Paramount ME+C3Pro61000EC robotic unit available as part of the Virtual Telescope Project facility in Manciano, Italy. The telescope tracked the comet during the imaging session.

We also managed to image the inner coma at higher resolution, with the results below.

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks shows dust waves close to its nuclear region: 7 Mar. 2024.

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks shows dust waves close to its nuclear region: 7 Mar. 2024.

This image comes from the sigma-clipping combination of 11, 120-second exposures, unfiltered and unguided, remotely taken with the Celestron C14+Paramount ME+SBIG ST8-XME robotic unit available as part of the Virtual Telescope Project. The telescope tracked at the comet’s rates of motion. The resulting frame was carefully processed via wavelet analysis to show the complex structures around the false nucleus, with several dust shells.

A rotational (Larson-Sekanina) rotational gradient was applied, to better investigate structures close to the false nucleus

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks shows many structures close to its false nucleus: 7 Mar. 2024.

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks shows many structures close to its false nucleus: 7 Mar. 2024.

Starting from the original hi-res frame, Adriano Valvasori (ALMO observatory) kindly produced some fine processing, using specific filters for cometary images, getting the results below.

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, several filters applied: 7 Mar. 2024.

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, several filters applied: 7 Mar. 2024.

Next 10 Mar., starting at 18:30 UTC, we will show this comet live!

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