I shot comet ISON on the morning of November 3rd, 2013. I devoted most of the morning to Comet Lovejoy, but there was still enough time to get nearly 30 good sub-images of this object which is enough to make a pretty decent image. Clicking the picture brings up a half-of-full-size enlargement. Click here to see the image at the camera’s full resolution. The “star-streaks” version is below:
Comet Lovejoy is dominating the comet fiesta that is now occurring in our skies. It is the brightest and the biggest, by far! My most recent images show a 70 arc-minute tail that is best seen in the negative inset view.
I was looking at some unprocessed data recently (Oct 5, 2014) and found this set of 40 sub-images taken at ISO 6400. It was a batch of 60 second subs, so only 40 minutes worth of integration. It came out surprisingly well for just 40 minutes. I’ll have to try some more with that setting and see if I can get some dimmer nebulae.
A very small and dim comet in the early evening skies of Pegasus. A star streaks version of the image is below.
Continue reading Comet Brewington on November 2, 2013, 17:10 UT
Seven sub-images done quickly before twilight turned the sky too blue.
Friday, November 1st, 2013 was clear and cool. I was convinced that Saturday morning would be crystal clear and I could get some great shots of all the comets in the sky. Unfortunately, the sub-tropical jet stream intruded and brought with it high altitude clouds and ruined my plans to do my comet imaging.
I shot lots of subs for ISON, but deleted more than I kept because most had clouds in them. Some had tree branches and I kept them because I had nothing else. Consequently, the image quality suffered with the low number of sub-images and the gradients introduced by the tree branches in the pics. Oh, well…
BTW, the star-streaks version is below:
Comet Lovejoy with only 2 exposures – 1×120 @ ISO 800 and 1×71 sec @ ISO 800. Clouds were in all the other sub-images and were not really useable.
Here’s one I’ve been struggling with trying to get the noise down since conditions were very poor when I shot the sub-images for this. Compare mine to this one by Damian Peach shot less than 45 minutes later. 🙂
I have another image below that I initially posted. For the above image, I reprocessed it from the original stacks. But, I used a slightly different blending method (screen blending) for the comet and background star image to create the composite and lighten blending for the image below:
An image of Comet Lovejoy taken in difficult conditions. Transparency was bad and the LP almost overwhelmed the 2 minutes exposure. Then, my laptop rebooted for no apparent reason in the middle of the set. By the time I was ready to start shooting again, Lovejoy was in the trees.
That’s the “star freeze” version above and below is the “star streaks” version:
Continue reading Comet Lovejoy (C/2013 R1) on October 27, 2013
Here’s an area I’ve always wanted to shoot simply because I like seeing this in my binoculars. 🙂