Hi Richard,

Well, my strange summer weather continues.  Lot of low clouds and fog in the morning.  In almost 40 years of living in Southern California, I have never seen summer weather like this.    We have a tough sitting over us pulling in the low clouds and fog from the ocean.  We typically get this weather in May and June (May grey and June gloom, as we locals say). If I was at my dark observing site (5000') none of this would matter, but my imaging telescope is at ~500' behind my house, about 25 miles from the coast.  Oh well..

The only good news is that it is clear in the early evening (until midnight or 1am).  So I have the most impressive run of visual comet observations I think I have ever had of a comet 20 F3 (including 1P/Halley) - 32 out of 34 nights so far. I have also been imaging it, but I have yet to convince myself of anything like hoods in the coma on my images.  Yes, I have processed them with the L-S filter and other ways. And yes, they were very short exposures at first (3 sec. both because of brightness and motion) when the comet finally got high enough in the evening sky.   I will continue to play with the images to see if I can get anything out of them.  I have also looked visually for detail in the coma with my 10" L and 20"L (at 5,000') and couldn't see anything definite.  I would caution folks (this is not directed at you - just a general comment) about comparing this comet to Hale-Bopp just because hoods can be pulled out of the images.  With Hale-Bopp, hoods and jets could be seen visually for months with small telescopes, no processing necessary.  Simply not comparable, in my opinion.

Sorry, I will get off my soapbox now - my results to date for 29P are attached.  I may have a chance this weekend for another observation, but we are suppose to mostly have low clouds and fog in the morning for the next couple of weeks.  Ugh.

Best regards,

Charles