Comet Holmes is one of the periodic comets in our Solar System. Discovered
already in 1892, it was known as a faint object. The idea for this student
research project was developed at the Hamburg Observatory during October 2007
when comet Holmes unexpectedly indicated a rapid increase in its brightness and
made waves throughout the media. High quality optical images were released by
the Hubble Space Telescope at that time as can be seen
here .
The morphological study of the comet was carried
out with exposures taken with the Oskar Lühning Telescope at the Hamburg
Observatory by Carolin Liefke, Inga Nielsen and Natalia Lewandowska. The aim
was to work out structures in the gas tail and examine the region of the core
in search for hints which could explain its sudden increase in magnitude.