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12P/Pons-Brooks rotating core

Processing Solar System Comet
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Jan Erik Vallestad avatar
Jan Erik Vallestad avatar
I decided to give my latest 12P image another focus, mainly editing it to highlight the core while ignoring all else (mostly). Does anyone have any input on this, or has anyone done anything similar before?

I was quite surprised at the detail I was able to pull from this data really, I've uploaded four editions so far but I'm not done processing yet.

https://www.astrobin.com/eqxd1j/0/
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Jan Erik Vallestad avatar
Jan Erik Vallestad avatar
Some data captured by fellow Norwegian, Odd Trondal, can be seen here. This also confirms the rotation seen in the images. I've re-visited all my 12P images from the last week and can clearly see different rotations on each image as well. I'm working on getting some sort of animation from the data.

https://spaceweathergallery2.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=203962
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Jan Erik Vallestad avatar
Jan Erik Vallestad avatar
For those interested; The luminance image has now been featured here: https://spaceweather.com/ (Although a sharper edit with no denoise exist among the revisions). It has also been posted in the APOD focus group on Facebook by their editors.

An animation has been posted as well, but it's not easy to get the same amount of detail on each sub-exposure: https://www.astrobin.com/eqxd1j/I/
Jon Rista avatar
Jon Rista avatar
Very interesting… Does it rotate fast enough to create a video of it?
Jan Erik Vallestad avatar
Jan Erik Vallestad avatar
Jon Rista:
Very interesting... Does it rotate fast enough to create a video of it?

I believe the synodic rotation period is about 57 hours, so I doubt that we could get any noticeable rotation within a single session, at leat not in the short time span that the comet has been available for me to image (around two hours max pr evening). However, since I've imaged it on several different days the past week there are distinct changes from day to day correlating to the rotation.

Edit: An animation between the different sessions/images would probably be something I could do though.
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Christian Koll avatar
Christian Koll avatar
Jan Erik, this is very interesting, thanks very much for the heads-up!

Now I will need to check my data for these swirls in the core…

Chris
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Jan Erik Vallestad avatar
Jan Erik Vallestad avatar
Christian Koll:
Jan Erik, this is very interesting, thanks very much for the heads-up!

Now I will need to check my data for these swirls in the core…

Chris

Given that it's photographed with enough resolution I suspect you will find it. I just noticed that another fellow amateur astronomer has been doing this as well after looking at my images at https://spaceweather.com/ and has posted his own results there as well. 

I think this may help confirm the presence of cryovolcanic activity and this might be an outburst that we're seeing.
Jan Erik Vallestad avatar
Jan Erik Vallestad avatar
I'm in contact with the author of spaceweather.com now about the observed changes to the "swirl" that I have seen. There are a lot of variables at play here, rotation/orientation, turbulence, solar winds, seeing etc. so I'm not going to state that the lanes surrounding the core is 100% growing, but comparing the images it does seem to become stronger towards my last observation. It might just be my eyes playing tricks on me though after spending so much time looking at these.

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