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.

The nearly full moon rose about an hour after twilight ended, so that gave me enough time to get 30 subs of Comet Lovejoy Q2 before it came up and started washing out the comet.   Lovejoy looks like it is not as bright as it once was, but it still has a long tail.

I was trying to get a negative view of Comet Lovejoy’s tail to show the most detail and I stumbled upon this view.   It looks just like an eyeball.  LoL!  🙂

Click here to see an extra-large version of the above.

Here’s the StarStreaks version:

Finally, here’s the StarFreeze version:

I don’t shoot very many deep sky images with a moon past first quarter, but with comets I can make an exception.  Lovejoy is a really photogenic comet and it even looks good in poor conditions.   Clouds came in and I had to stop imaging after shooting less than 20 sub-images.   But, with this comet, 51 minutes of integration was enough to show it without blurring due to the tail rotation that is evident in my previous animated GIF images.

Speaking of animated GIF’s, I created one with the last 3 days of images.  On the second day, I put two images in – one from the beginning of the imaging session and one at the end of the session.  It doesn’t show much except the tail flapping around.  Part of that might be due to a difference in camera orientation.  Anyway, I include it below as another part of the documentation of Comet Lovejoy Q2’s activity: