Well actually, the visible debris field is much larger than Jupiter, but this image shows that it is visually as large as the moon. The full moon subtends almost exactly 1/2 degree of the sky. The inner orange circle (overlay from HNSKY*) is also 0.5 degrees.
How cool is that? From a little speck of space debris to a cloud of debris that’s this huge in about 2 weeks.
Excuse the wiggles in the long exposure (seen on the brighter stars), my setup was a bit weak tonight because all of the neighbors had their porch lights on. I was forced into a pretty non-optimal location for placing the tripod. The jiggle is probably mostly due to the shutter opening and closing causing the camera to move. This is a 10 second exposure at f/2.8, 200mm, 1600 ISO.
November 14th, 2007 at 11:42 am
I can’t believe I haven’t had the kids (especially Emily) out to see the comet at all yet. We’re going to miss our chance. *sigh* Need to make this a priority some evening this week. What time does it rise in the sky?