Here’s Comet Encke on Jan 29, 2017. I imaged it two years ago when it last came around. On this night it was very low in a very bad LP zone right above bright parking lot lights and street lights. I’m surprised anything even registered. As you can see, it was small and dim and almost, but not quite, swallowed up by the LP. 🙁
On Jan 29, 2017, a two day old moon was in the sky and I shot it first thing before it sank too low to image. This is somewhat of an HDR image in that I took a series of 4 exposures, long to short, to try and get the earthshine and details in the crescent. I aligned and stacked them in PS with about a 50% blend for each exposure.
Here’s one I have not shot in a while. I was hoping it would come out better, but unfortunately, I lost quite a few of the sub-images to bad guiding. I was supposed to get 40 or more, but only 23 were good enough to use.
UPDATE:
I was able to shoot this again and get lots more sub-images. Not too bad considering the light pollution that I had to endure.
Another Comet Johnson image. It seems to be a bit brighter than last time, but not much bigger. Eventually, it should get more photogenic as it gets closer to Earth and the Sun..
Another Bortle Red Zone image with a relatively short exposure of 40 minutes in 1 minute subs. I have another batch of 1 minute subs taken at ISO 800 to add to this, but here is the preliminary image for the time being.
Update:
The additional 40×60 sec @ ISO 800 subs-images are added into the mix and the updated full frame image and a close-in crop are above. 🙂
Just for fun, I added the above image with 2 previous images of M51 taken with bigger scopes and the results are below:
I’ve finally bagged a new comet after almost 2 years since I shot my last one, which was Comet Lovejoy. This one is small and dim at the moment, but it has a neat tail.
Comet Johnson is predicted to get better with the best views coming this summer. So far, it looks like it will be an easy target for the next few months. I’ll probably get more images of this one as it develops.
An additional 45 sub-images were added to the previous version of this image, which was 11×60 sec @ ISO 200. So, this is 101 minutes of exposure integration.
It is surprising that you could get the Merope nebulousity in the Pleiades to show up under severe light pollution (LP) with just 10 minutes of exposure. It was definitely transparent this night, so that helped. Processing was no fun, however. Nasty red LP took its toll.
Update Feb 5, 2017:
I did a guiding test on Feb 3rd and used M45 as my target. I shot lots of sub-images with 15 and 30 second exposures. I took the best 74 and combined those with the above data is this is what I got:
It certainly smoothed out that muddy-looking background LP remnant splotchy-ness appearance. Not too bad for shooting from a location next to shopping center parking lots. lol
This was one of the first test shots for the night as I was trying to tune the guiding software, mini-guidescope and guide camera. It came out OK for just 5 sub-images.
Data from a 3 panel mosaic taken with a Meade SN-8 telescope back in 2007 was combined with data taken with a Televue TV-85 from 2011. I used Registar and was able to match the data to the base image, which was the 3-panel mosaic.
I like the way it came out and the orientation is in the classic style for M31. Thinking about it further, it might be a good project for me to get even more data and add in everything together to get one deep image. Hmmm…