View Comet Holmes (17P)

It's easy to find in Perseus in the evening sky.

Chart by Sky & Telescope

Amateur astronomers the world over have been stunned and amazed by the weirdest new object to appear in the sky in memory. 

On October 24th, periodic Comet Holmes (17P) brightened dramatically — by nearly a million times — virtually overnight.  For no apparent reason, the comet erupted from a very dim magnitude 17 to about magnitude 2½.  Within a day its starlike nucleus had expanded into a perfectly round, bright little disk visible in binoculars and telescopes.  It looked like no comet ever seen.

Its startling outburst, however, has a precedent.  The comet was also in a major eruption 115 years ago, in November 1892, when English amateur Edwin Holmes was the first to spot it.... 

Photo by Sean Walker, Nov. 8, 2007



Photo by Alan Dyer



Photo by Dennis di Cicco, Feb. 12, 2008

"Here's the latest in my continuing saga of photographing Comet Holmes with the TV-NP127is (5-inch) telescope and Apogee Alta camera," writes Sky & Telescope's Dennis di Cicco.  "This shot is from Monday evening [2-11-08] in the cold and high wind.  Exposures were 40 minutes blue, 40 minutes green, and 50 minutes red.  The field here is almost exactly 3° wide, with north up.  This comet is getting huge!  So much so that I initially had a difficult time seeing it in a short exposure because it looked like the typical 'hot spot' in the center of the frame due to optical vignetting."