Comet Holmes has brightened rapidly recently, to the point where it is about as bright as the stars in the Big Dipper. Even from suburban skies, this is a naked-eye object. I got some photos using my Nikon D50 camera
This photo shows the labeled comet, with the Pleiades circled and labeled and Cassiopeia outlined and labeled. If you click on the picture, you will get a larger, unlabeled version of the image.
Here is a picture of Comet Holmes. Compared to other stars, it's obviously not a star, even in this photograph with my Nikon camera. To get this image, I took a short exposure at maximum zoom. Again, if you click on the image, you get a larger version.
Here's a trick for getting pictures of just a few stars with a digital camera:
- Mount the camera on a tripod.
- Take a picture with the least zoom.
- Look at the image and based on what you see, try to center the star you're after.
- Zoom in a bit on the star.
- Repeat 2,3, and 4 until you are at maximum zoom.
Note: The sky appears to move because the Earth is rotating. At 300 mm zoom on my camera, stars appear as lines if the time-lapse photo is about 3 seconds or more. Astrophotographers compensate for this by either taking many short-duration photographs and adding them together (compensating for motion) or by having special mounts with electronic drives that compensate for the motion of the sky. If you just have a camera and tripod, you won't have that. If you have a telescope with mount and drive as well as a camera, you can either shoot through the telescope or duck tape the camera to the telescope. I really don't recommend the latter, as the duck tape residue is hard to get off the camera and telescope.
And yes, it's actually duck tape. It's not the best stuff for air ducts.