C/2014 E2 (Jacques), provisionally designated as S002692, is a long-period comet discovered by the Brazilian astronomers Cristóvão Jacques Lage de Faria, Eduardo Pimentel and João Ribeiro de Barros on the night of 13 March 2014.

It has been a nice Telescope Comet this summer.  Here it is seen on August 30, 2014 as it traveled near mu-Cephei (The garnet Star) and its associated faint Red Nebular region (IC 1396) in the Constellation Cepheus.

Mu-Cephei- Herschel’s Garnet Star may be the largest star visible to the naked eye - it is roughly 2.4 billion miles across! If it replaced our Sun, it would extend beyond the orbit of Saturn. Mu Cephei is currently in the last stages of its life:

It has started to fuse helium into carbon as opposed to hydrogen into helium like other main sequence stars.  The helium-carbon cycle shows that the star may explode as a supernova although this may not be for millions of years.

It Sits on the edge of the large Emission Nebula IC 1396.  Part of the large molecular cloud known as the Cepheus Bubble, IC 1396 is an HII region of star formation. The nebula is visually quite large, spanning three degrees in our nighttime sky. The entire nebula is illuminated by the hot blue supergiant at the center of the nebula.

Within the nebula is IC 1396A - the Elephant Trunk Nebula (Not seen in the image as it is located just beyond the top of the image frame). The nebula also contains numerous comet shaped Bok globules - the dark nebulae scattered throughout the field of view.

Imaging Data

Date: 8-30-2014

Location : Sudbury, Massachusetts

Optics : Televue- 85 with 0.8X Focal Reducer

Filter(s) : Astronomik CLS-CCD and Ha

Mount : Astrophysics Mach 1 GTO

Autoguiding : Stellarvue 60mm Finderscope with CoSTAR Guider and PHD

Camera : Canon EOS 1000D Astro-modified

Exposure info : 12 x 120 sec Exposures at ISO 800 And 3 x 20 min Exposure at ISO 800 Through HA

Total Exposure : 24 Minutes RGB with 60 minutes HA

Processing:  Pixinsight- Stack of Star aligned Combined with Stack of Comet Aligned with HA data added to R Channel.