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.