Astroblog: Comet Elenin in STEREO H1B (August 23 and 24)

Monday, August 29, 2011

Comet Elenin in STEREO H1B (August 23 and 24)

Elenin passes through the image field of view of the STEREO H1 Behind imager on August 23. Click to embiggen. Image processed from NASA/STEREO raw images using ImageJ. Inverted image, dark lines are imaging artifacts.

Elenin passes through the image field of view of the STEREO H1 Behind imager on August 24. Click to embiggen. Image processed from NASA/STEREO raw images using ImageJ. Inverted image, dark lines and weird white blobs are imaging artifacts.

Once again, as with this post and this post I've zoomed and cropped these images of Comet Elenin from the STEREO H1B imager in order to capture the tail of Elenin. It doesn't really work so well this time as the comet is fading rapidly. On calibrated images the comet has faded over 80% since the 19th, but we have to factor in that it is further away from the H1B camera despite being closer to the Sun. Mercury is in the field of view, and an asteroid on the 23rd (there is lots more on the larger images). Here's the AVI animation of the August 23 images (1 Mb) and the AVI animation of the August 24 images (1 Mb).

Labels: comet, Stereo comet astronomy, Stereo Satellite