Comet Lulin had a disconnect in its tail on the morning of 2/4/09. This is a sequence of images during the disconnect.

We were lucky enough to capture an intriguing phenomena: in our images is clearly visible a nice disconnection event (DE) in the plasma tail of the comet (evidenced by a red circle in this rendition). The DE indicates that the comet has recently passed through a disturbance in the magnetic field carried by the solar wind, that destroyed the original plasma tail, creating a new one. The separation of the two ion tails indentified by the DE, is visible in our image as a kind of elongated and diffuse "knot" along the plasma tail

I noticed a smudge at the edge of the field in the close up shot with the 16" scope. The image taken widefield showed a portion of the tail disconnected. Have photographed this before in other comets, and always exciting to grab images when it happens. The closeup taken at Feb 4.52. The widefield taken at Feb 4.55

I finally had a chance to shoot Comet Lulin! It was just before twilight and right after a cold front had passed through, so it was crystal clear. Equipment used included a TV-85 refractor, Hutech Canon XS, IDAS-LPS filter and an Atlas EQ-G w/EQMOD. Exposure was 15x180 sec @ ISO 1600.

This is an animation of Comet Lulin, taken between 5:03 and 6:22 AM, on the morning of February 3rd, using an ASA N8 astrograph.