Looks like the disconnection event over the last two days has shortened Lovejoy down to a nub.  I expect that it might grow back a new tail, hopefully.

Here’s an another version of the data, but I added 35 minutes more of exposure to the mix:

The nearly disconnected tail of Lovejoy blowing in the solar wind.   Something in the local space environment disrupted it within the last 2 days, it seems. Probably some kind of solar event like a CME or rogue magnetic field change caused this.

A big knot moving down the tail of Comet Lovejoy with the old tail partially disconnected and hanging on as best as it can.

Moving further west each night, Comet Lovejoy Q2 continues to change and present a different profile each day.  It has gone back to a fan tail with streamers, much like it looked back on Jan 25 and Jan 16, 2015.    There is a pattern there, but the period remains elusive.

Here’s another comet image.  Not as bright as it was, but still putting on a good show.

I’ve been wanting to shoot some sub-images of Comet Lovejoy at relatively low ISO’s and for at least 15 minutes.  Here’s one that was shot at ISO 200 and boosted up a bit with some curves manipulation in PS.  So, this is a representation of old-school, one-shot imaging like I used to do back in the day with film.  You don’t have much in the way of post processing since the image looks fairly nice without that sort of thing.

Update:

Here’s the preliminary image from the data captured in the same session as the above:

Ok, I got some decent data on this imaging session, even though there were some high altitude clouds that came and went a few times.   Then, the moon rose and I stopped imaging at that point.    Lovejoy is presenting its thin, edge-on tail mode to us on this night.  It makes the tail brighter, that’s for sure.