Atlas Falling Apart?

[TimW]

It was mentioned in another thread that Comet Atlas may be falling apart. The 2 images of Atlas below were taken 6 days apart. The left image was taken tonight (4/6) and the image on the right was taken back on 3/31. I used the same camera settings to take both images. The image taken on 4/6 does indeed appear less bright and more diffused.

Atlas Comparison.jpg (30.83 KiB) Viewed 2022 times

[Paul D]

Tim,

First off thanks for sharing the images with us. I am not convinced that it is falling apart though from your images. March 31 the moon was only at 40% illumination and on April 6th the moon was at 98% illumination. I think if we were to take the moon out of the picture your two images would be pretty much the same as far as magnitude and brightness.

[TimW]

Here's an updated composite image of Comet Atlas. All images were taken using the same camera settings. It's definitely getting dimmer.

Atlas Comparison.png (243.96 KiB) Viewed 2001 times

[Pete]

Hi Tim,

I've been working on a similar composite only at a much higher magnification and with varying exposure time. Will post to the board soon. Can't say ''bout the brightness but the nucleus in your images and in mine appears to be elongating, suggesting a breakup.

[Pete]

Hey Tim,

The breakup's confirmed. April 12 image from The Virtual Telescope:



I've no idea as to how this stack of 1 minute images was processed, Yours look good, somewhat approximating the above image. My 1 minute frames show the comet turning from a teardrop to an oval but otherwise are horrible:



Probably overexposure as the fact that I've got many many more stars in my FOV. Even though the Virtual Scope is a 17" it's possible that my unfiltered rig is more far more sensitive?

[TimW]

In order to get as accurate of a comparison as possible, each of my images is unprocessed using the the same exposure length and gain settings. They are single images with no post processing done at all.