Broke the Boattini jinx last night and managed to see the comet at 0230 UT in 8" LX90 x59 - the "dark sky" altitude is now very reasonable and the comet was reasonably well visible as a fuzzy blob approx. 8 arc mins in diameter though the sky conditions were poor, with lots of drifting fog/stratus which frustrated attempts to photograph it.

Or perhaps it had already evaporated? I wonder if it's still on the SOHO images.

As you say, mag. 5 right next to the Sun isn't much even during a total eclipse.

Hard for a non-expert like me to tell.

What about the two "UFOs" on the horizon just to the right of it?

Edit: I'm not for one minute suggesting that they might be flying saucers ... but they appear to be flying and they are, so far as I'm concerned, unidentified. Ball lightning??

Well done everyone - especially Paul whose image appeared on BBC Newsline!

The cloud from which the funnel is hanging appear yellowish ... is that usual? Has the funnel actually picked anything up?

Full report:

Although cloudy, there were signs that it might be breaking, so I went to Portballintrae car park - at 0820 UT the view to the West was as follows:

But to the south east cloud cover was total and it was actually raining lightly.

By 0830 UT it was apparent that the bright patch was moving away

Rain getting heavier, apparently from a sheet of altostratus, this was the view to the north west

with just a bright patch towards the Sun


The rain persisted. By 09:20 UT there were signs of a clearance to the SE

but it never materialised - the rain continued, though it got a bit lighter.

At 09:45 UT I made the decision to abandon Portballintrae and drove inland in the direction of the clearance. Arriving in Derrykeighan there were shadows! There was only a small hole in the thick cloud, and there was still some high cloud, but I stopped & set up the refractor with its objective filter, and managed to quickly snap a single image before the cloud closed in again.

This was taken with 80mm f/6 refractor, Canon 2x tele-extender, Canon 40D, 1/250 sec (at f/12), ISO 400

So ... I just caught the tail end of the eclipse ... glad to hear some of you had better luck!

Full report to follow. Portballintrae car park NBG, at 10:45 drove off in the direction of a likely looking gap and managed to get a single white light image through a small hole (there was still some high level cloud).

OK, here's my guess.

It doesn't need to be raining where you are to see a rainbow. The light from the Sun hits the drops of rain falling and is refracted back to your eye. So you can see a rainbow after the sun has set, because the sun is still shining on the rain falling from the cloud. The Sun can be seen shining on the clouds behind the rainbow; and the rainbow does not touch the ground because the light from the lower part of the rain curtain isn't illuminated.

The light is mostly red because of the scattering of the shorter wavelengths as the light travels a long distance through the atmosphere. Which is why you see the disc of the Sun red at sunset, or indeed why Jupiter looks yellowish or orange (depending on how hazy the air is) this year.

The bow isn't pure red, the other colours are there but are faint. There is a trace of the outer bow as well.

Interesting and unusual, all the same.

The photographic magnitudes are not always the same as the visual ones, it depends a lot on how condensed the coma is. Very diffuse comets will sometimes be very hard to record even though they're bright in magnitude terms - for instance in April I was having difficulty imaging Comet Holmes even though it was still mag. 5 - because it was spread out over a couple of square degrees of sky.

2008J1 was around mag. 9.5 and 6P was around 12. The limiting magnitude in these images is around 14. This camera and lens can get to mag. 15 with 10 x 2 min subexposures in good sky conditions.

The one I use is Deep Sky Stacker http://deepskystacker.free.fr/ which is FREE and works excellently, it's a lot less effort than trying to do the same job with Photoshop!

Well done - what a well recorded observation!

Now you've caught your first cometary image, the challenge is to get ever fainter ones.

Yeah, it started off terrific here too. Then stratocumulus moved in (around 2330 UT) and it wasn't so good after that - a few temporary clearances - a very light "drizzle" shower around 0100 and a slightly heavier one around 0215 by which time there was fairly extensive high cloud visible through the gaps, and the SC was obviously hiding something with precipitation potential, so I called it quits. Just as I was collecting the tripod there was a bright meteor - about mag. -2, very likely a Perseid,  visible in the NW (Bootes region) visible through a gap in the cloud cover too small and too low to be useful for observing. Very warm despite the breeze, which at least deterred the unidentified flying objects with sharp teeth from attacking me.

As for the image noise - I thought it was "well known" that sensor noise approximately doubles with each 7C rise in temperature, and it's pretty warm these nights! I suspect the best noise removal routines for star photos are those which selectively unsharpen the sky background, leaving areas with sharp gradients (stars) alone. However this would still have a strong negative effect on "faint fuzzies".

Good fortune - still, you mostly make your own luck!

Assuming the weather isn't hopeless I'll be on the main car park at Portballintrae with a 80mm refractor + white light filter, filtered binoculars, a PST and a few "eclipse viewers" made from offcuts of Baader film.

What's the topping on that pizza? 

Went for a walk this morning, obvious signs of convective activity but what I saw of the heads looked more like cumulus congestus than cumulonimbus. Saw no lightning, heard no thunder, precipitation a few minutes of very light drizzle from stratus fractus under the darker patches. No feeling of "electric charge" in the air but very muggy despite a steady force 3-4 SE breeze, with no gusts or sudden direction changes which would be typical of strong convective activity.

Looking to the SW right now, apparently the back edge of a front or trough, a line of transparent clear sky is appearing.

I wish it would thunder (and, having been struck 3 times by lightning within 20 minutes whilst in the French Alps, I really hate it) - perhaps it would cool down enough to be able to sleep!