Big comet floats into view

As you can see, I can't fit the 2 lovely tails of (2009 P1) Comet Garradd into the field of view of the Atik camera on the 20" scope. I limited the total exposure duration to about 7 mins, but there is still some movement of the comet. The faint fan of tails to the bottom (~west) is just visible, and the big slightly redder coloured anti tail goes up. I think it's about time I tried a picture of this on a smaller scope. This picture was taken at 23:00 on Feb 19th 2012. This comet looks set to put on a nice show for us in the northern hemisphere, as it's now up all night.

Tempel 2

Here's a pic of a comet that's floating around in Cetus at the moment. On the spur of the moment I used my mobile to visit the heavens above website for charts and pointed the big scope at it. It was difficult to get a decent photo, mainly because it was quite low down in a poor quality sky. Compared with the usual capacity of the 'big' scope to gather light from 17th magnitude galaxies for your camera, you wouldn't imagine 10P/Tempel 2 to be as bright as 8½ magnitude (~2800x brighter). I've always found comets much harder to see than their magnitude suggests. Maybe it's their diffuse nature that makes them so elusive.