Comet assay

[Ivaylo]

Hello, I am characterising comet tails. I am not using a specific software for that, just Photoshop. I got problems cause when calculating the lenght of the comet tail, there are some fragments that are far away from ... how to say it... the main tail, that is intensively green. What should I do? Should I include them in the lenght of the whole comet? I am doing this for the first time and I will apreciate help of any kind.

[Klaynos]

(Surely this is astro? Unless you're talking about the goldfish variant?)

 

I don't think anyone here is an expert on this, but I'd say as long as in your write up you are clear about which you did, and you constantly do the same thing then it wont matter.

[grifter]

I wouldn't call myself an expert but i hope i can help a little

 

there are normally two tails produced by a comet : One tail is due to the comet's dust particles, the other is due to ionized gas from the comet (coma)

 

this coma is the comet's atmosphere which is capable of extending for millions of miles and is super thin.

 

the easy way to distinguish the two comes from the ion tail's special interaction with the Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF), this causes the ion tail to always points directly away from the Sun.

 

if you are measuring the coma I would measure to the point at which the coma becomes fragmented, i.e. ignore the "chunks" breaking away from the comet as these will cause the length of the comets tail to change i.e. if you took the picture a second later that chunk could be allot further back therefore the comets tail would be much larger... at least this way the tail remains at a almost constant length

 

you may also wish to measure the length of the ion tail (so long as its a good picture) also so long as you aren't dealing with Comet Hyakutake considering it's tail was measured at a whopping 570 million kilometres!!!