Comet C/2017 K2 PanSTARRS SpaceWeather in its core
Taken by Dan Bartlett on July 1, 2022 @
June Lake California USA
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Details:
Fortunate to have over a week of fine weather to image (yes we desperately need the rain), I've been following Comet C/2017 K2 PanSTARRS nightly and have a backlog of uncompleted unprocessed image stacks. I should go out and buy some equipment ~ brings in the clouds.
While attempting to batch process nights upon nights of comet images I was successful in separating and align the comet-only and starfield-only images in PixInsight. Going through the precursory glance through last nights, captured with a meager RASA8' F2 and an asi2600mcP, I noticed a number of "jet like" bursts on the linear stretched "cometonly" image. The blue green coma appeared to have a multidirectional burst like pattern emanating from the core.
Not knowing what to expect I took the comet-only image stretched it, applied HDRMT(Top image of multiple panels) and then applied a LarsonSekanina filter (lower image) using PixInsight.
Real or artifact? I've reached out to some experts in the field and heard back from Dr Clay Sherrod thus far. He indicated that this has been seen in active comets and said the cause is probably "...there appears to be some type of rotational skewing of jets or emissions out of the comet that are showing synchronous patterns in relation to perhaps solar energy or spin, or both. "
To my knowledge, if these images are true, this might be the earliest record indicating this structure on C/2017 K2
Photographer's website:
https://astrob.in/eilz9v/0/
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