Comet Machholz

The apparition of Comet Machholz in 2005 has given amateur astronomers the opportunuity to image it.  Martin Crow of CMHAS had managed to not only image it but take many images to make a short animation, as can be seen below.  The video below is a 10 frame animated GIF file and is 673K in size, which will mean it will take some time to download if you are not accessing this page using broadband - but it's worth it!.
 

The images were taken on 2 January 2005 between 20:03UT and 21:23UT.  In the animation shows the comet tracking across the sky and its tail dynamically changing shape with a possible hint of a detachment.

Now for the techie stuff:

Each original image was obtained using a Celestron C8 SCT at f3.3 with a MX916 CCD camera.  The exposure was 20 seconds and an interval of 60 seconds between shots.  The relatively short exposure was designed to give an unsaturated nucleus so that some photometry might be done on it.  All of the images were dark frame subtracted and flat fielded  prior to processing.   Each of the frames is a group of 5 original images converted into and AVI file and then seriously processed in Registax.  The resulting images were then save as JPEGs so that they could be opened in Adobe Photo Shop to align each frame.