Comet McNaught - C/2006 P1

In early January 2007 Comet McNaught surprised astronomers by brightening much more than expected.
THe weather here in the UK was foul, however the sky cleared briefly on the vening of the 10th which allowed me to view the comet through a break in the cloud for about 20 minutes or so.
The comet was very low in the sky, but the brightest I have ever seen a comet. Not as bright as Venus which was visible a good 10 minutes before I saw the comet, however the comet was nearer to the Sun and in slightly brighter sky. I would guess Magnitude -2 or brighter.

	Roll your mouse over the image to the left to point out were the comet is in the picture. The image was taken with a Sony 4.1 MP Cybershot @ 3x zoom. Give some idea of the naked eye view of the comet. It was however very obvious in the sky and much easier to find than in this picture. Below are some images taken through the eyepiece of an 80mm F8 refractor fitted with a 32mm eyepiece (12.5 x Magnification) The one directly below (and it's negative) are a stack of a movie taken with the Sony Cybershot... 450 frames.
The image to the left is a stack of 300 frames (out of 400) from a Sony DV Camcorder held to the eyepiece of the 80mm F5 refreactor. The auto focus (and a touch of zoom of the camcorder helped to make this a better image. Below are a sequence from the same AVI, this time I have applied a synthetic flat field to the AVI using Jon Groves iPrep software. This has brought out some more of the tail - with the aid of some strong unsharp mask in Serif Photoplus. Thanks to Carsten Arnholm for the tip through QCUIAG