Comet 41P Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak
I imaged Comet 41P Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak in the constellation Virgo using my current “image the field and hope” technique. Just a hint of it on the notebook monitor, but I couldn’t be certain as it was close to noise level. I verified that I was in the correct field with a star chart program on the notebook and a Sloan DSS image of the area I grabbed earlier. According to the ephemeris the comet was about visual magnitude 12.2. It was fairly low, about 18° above the horizon when the images were acquired.
Image taken last evening between 10:50pm MDT and 10:58 MDT from Boulder Ranch open space trail head (north of Boulder, CO). Sky was clear, transparency was good, temperature was 73°F, 40% humidity, turbulence between 5 and 6/10, no wind. Image taken with Celestron Nexstar11, Meade F3.3 focal reducer, Stellacam2 video camera set at gain 9/14, integrate at 256, and gamma at medium. Images were dark subtracted, flat field and bias corrected with ImagePlus. Images aligned with Registax3 and then brightness enhanced with ImagePlus. Photoshop Elements2 used to create animated gif.
July 15th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
I really like images such as yours.I have a lot of fun researching star fields,just to find out where the object is in the image.
I had my scope out last night also but,the haze was so bad that I was only able to get of few images of some glob clusters.That is of course,before the batteries in my camera died.