Monthly Archives: November 2020

Comets

Comet Close Approach – ATLAS (C/2020 M3 (ATLAS))

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C/2020 M3 (ATLAS) on Nov 13, 2020 or 1 day before closest approach. 27×60 sec subs stacked and blended into a background o 30 minutes with 30 sec sub-images.

A very dark sky would have made quite a difference for this comet, but to me it is almost too small to be worthy of a trip to the boonies just for this guy.    A runt comet.  lol

This was taken from a Bortle 7-8 zone in a Metro area  with the Optolong L-eNhance filter, my QHY183c camera and Televue TV-85 telescope.

It was moving very fast and exposures of two minutes showed slight trailing.   I made a star-streaks version with some 3×5 minute simulated exposures and 4×3 minute simulated exposures.   The actual sub-images were 30 seconds and SharpCap was used to LiveStack the simulated exposures.   Here it is below:

C/2020 M3 (ATLAS) on Nov 13, 2020. 3x5min and 4x3min simulated exposures.

This was taken before the 1st image, so you can see how far that sucker moved in the intervening time.