Comet Lulin disconnection event

Today we wanted to make some wide-field imaging of comet C/2007 N3 (LULIN), in search for large scale structural features.In our image (details in the caption):http://tinyurl.com/bugep4is clearly visible the characteristic dichotomy of this comet: a dusty anti-tail pointing toward the Sun (i.e. to South-East) and the highly structured ion (plasma) tail toward West,Northwest. This uncommon configuration, is due to the particular geometric circumstances occuring during these nights, with the comet seen nearly head-on as seen from Earth.Moreover, 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):http://tinyurl.com/bwryajThe 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.A 3x zoomed view of this feature is available here:http://tinyurl.com/ar9vsr The "knot" is dragged tailward by the solar wind, and will dissipate soon. More events like this are expected in the ...