Ok, I managed to get a shot of Comet Panstarrs despite the moon and lingering twilight. At least you see the comet. Somewhat. lol
It was a little difficult to shoot images and entertain visitors simultaneously. Its a long story, but suffice it to say that by the time I was finally shooting images, the comet was already deep in the muck. In fact, it was there by the time it got dark enough to shoot long exposures.
Oh, well… at least I didn’t scratch. 🙂
I was just playing around here. The nearly full moon was so bright that it allowed only very short exposures.
I struck out trying to image Comet Panstarrs on Sunday evening, March 24, 2013. It was just too short of a time to find it in bright twilight, bright moonlight and with its low altitude. However, I tried something to redeem myself while I still had the equipment setup. I shot the Pleiades with a bunch of 15 second unguided exposures. I managed to catch them and Comet C/2012 L2 (Linear) in the shot. This is cropped down quite a bit to just the cluster and comet.
By the way, the comet is in the lower right. Its that small greenish smudge. 🙂
It was predicted to be clear on March 20, 2013 when I took the above picture. However, a low bank of clouds moved in at the last moment and messed up my plans to shoot Comet Pan-STARRS with the Canon 200mm F/2.8 telephoto lens for a wide-angle view. The mount wasn’t tracking very well, either and I wasted quite a few shots because of that issue. So, the only good image of the comet came through a crack in the clouds.
A more formal presentation of the image data I captured the evening of March 16, 2013 (Mar 17, UT.)
This image of the comet was a lucky catch between cloud bands. There’s still some haze even in this shot, but you can see the comet and its tail well enough to make it worthwhile. I took a quite a few images, but most had clouds in it. The few that had the least clouds around the comet I copied just the comet and blended it in as a luminosity layer in PS.
So, the comet parts of 4 other 4-sec images, 15 other 2-sec images and a base 4-sec image is what I had and I did what I could to make it half-presentable. I could have totally scratched and not got anything, so I’m pretty happy with just this. Clouds are predicted for the next few days, so this might have been my last image of the comet until the moon is out of the sky.
This was probably the last night without significant interference from the Moon for Comet Panstarrs. I took advantage of the exceptionally clear evening and decided that I’d give it another go before moonlight washes it out. This base image was in the second to last set I shot this evening and I decided it looked photogenic enough to post. I took 40 x 4 second sub-images and stacked them and then overlayed the results of that on the base image to create this final image.
The above image was generated with data from 40 sub-images, calibrated and stacked in IRIS. It shows the extent of the tail better with more time. Once the comet is out of the twilight, the true tail length will hopefully be visible.
This is the same data as the first picture but close-cropped and the background color gradients neutralized. I was hoping it would show maybe a smidgen more tail than the first image in this version.
One more image follows:
I made an animated GIF of the comet and moon diving towards the horizon. There’s 30 images that make up the loop. Click here or the reduced animation image below to see it.
A stack of 5 images helps bring out the tail better. I calibrated and processed these in IRIS with some dark data taken right after the imaging session.