By physical necessity and as I've pointed out previously, the dust tail of
2011 W3 SHOULD be continuing to lengthen...at least until the surface
brightness of the outermost portions drop completely below the detection limits
of the method being employed. For the unaided eye I'm afraid that this will
occur fairly soon. However, for appropriately long exposed, highly
processed, fairly small-scale images this interval should be considerably
extended.

If astro-imagers familiar with the sorts of image processing done to bring
out the absolute threshold details in such objects as galaxies apply their
techniques to appropriate images of the comet I see no reason for the
ultimate length of the tail not turning out to be something in the order of
50-60 degrees by mid January. I know that years ago when I dabbled in this area
I could bring out details far beyond what I ever imagined were in the
original images (although the pictures no longer were very pretty to look at!)

J.Bortle




In a message dated 1/1/2012 12:22:53 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
seargent@... writes:


Hi Rob and all,
Yes, I did put down a couple of wrong numbers (lack of sleep I guess).
Still, it does not make a very great difference. The revised length comes out
at 39 degrees ... and this time I checked the numbers! The end appeared to
be near Theta Carinae, visible with averted vision only in "flashes".
Perhaps it was averted imagination, but I think it was real.
Cheers,
David




To: comets-ml@yahoogroups.com
From: rmn@...
Date: Sun, 1 Jan 2012 14:09:35 +1100
Subject: Re: [comets-ml] Tail still long






On Sun, 1 Jan 2012, David Seargent wrote:

> The tail has cleared the brightest part of the MW and this morning
> (Dec. 31. 1600 UT) I'm sure that I could trace it with averted vision
> into Carina; a length of (wait for it!) 45 degrees! The sky was very
> clear with a limiting naked-eye magnitude of around 6.5 or better.

Hi David,
I'd doubt this will be correct. My photos show the tail much more
clearly than to the naked eye, up to 33 deg, just into Carina,
but I can't trace it crossing the dark zone to the SE of eta Carinae.
45 deg would take it over theta Carinae. Calculation error?

Check my fish-eye shot from this morning at

http://msowww.anu.edu.au/~rmn/C2011W3.htm

I'll reorganise this page in the next few days.

Cheers, Rob





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