Great comets from the past and recent comets
Great comets from the past
Great comets in the past usually frightened people and they were taken for a bad signs. Of course this changed a lot a long time ago. In these days thanks to the spacecraft SOHO new comet discoveries are common and almost on a daily basis. In spite of this, the sight of a comet just by a naked eye never would be boring as they are always different.
Great comet Donati in 1858
Great comet 1681 II. in 1681
Both reprodu ns are from the book of J.J. von Litrow: Die Wunders des Himmels, published in 1878, Berlin.
From latest comets I admired comet 17P/Holmes and I was very sorry that I missed the Great comet of 2007 McNaught with its amazing tails...
Comet observations 2010
Lately I visited Baja Observatory in Southern Hungary where we tried to image few recent comets.
Here is the result of our imaging.
Picture of C/2007 Q3 is composition of 15 images of 60 sec and then processed in MaxIm DL and Photoshop.
C/2007 Q3