Some photos from my back garden (Dr Apostolos Christou, Armagh Observatory):
"I would like to share with you some pictures of comet Lulin I captured from my back garden on 3 March 2009. These two were 60-sec exposures taken ~11 minutes apart; the field is 30x20 arcmin wide. You can actually see the comet move with respect to the stellar background, by an arcminute or so, between the two images. Nice tail, but no sign of an antitail.
The telescope used was a 6" (15cm) f/5 Newtonian reflector and the CCD camera an SBIG ST-7 XMEI (765x510, 9-micron pixels). Pixel scale was 2.5 arcsec.
A the time the comet was 0.5 AU from the Earth, shining at an integrated magnitude of +6.6. At that distance, every pixel on the image corresponded to ~1,000 km at the comet.
