After its beautiful, surprising flareup last month, the 17P Holmes comet is fading at last.
It's still reflecting considerable amounts of sunlight, but its dust cloud has spread out to more than 870,000 miles wide. That's bigger than the sun, for anybody who's counting (and lots of amateur astronomers have been), and the distance means the light is too diffuse to retain its earlier brightness.
Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics are sharing one more picture worth seeing before Holmes mini-mania dies down, however. The photo seen here was taken on Nov. 4, from the MMT Observatory, with a camera called the Megacam.
It's one of the largest CCD-based cameras in existence, the Center says, with 36 nine-megapixel chips. Three separate exposures, with three separate color filters, were used to create this image.
So enjoy, and wave goodbye.
A Last Look at Comet Holmes [Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics]
(Image: Comet 17P Holmes, as seen on Nov. 4 at the MMT Observatory. Credit: M. Ashby & N. Caldwell (CfA))
