Vern’s Weblog

Comet C/2007 E2 (Lovejoy) was high up in the constellation Lyra when these images were taken early Sunday morning around 4 am. It was discovered by Australian amateur astronomy Terry Lovejoy on the 15th of March with a Canon 350D digital camera.

It was easy to find visually through the eyepiece. Not nearly as bright as the nearby ring nebula which I had to check out while in the neighborhood. The comet appears to have a bright core in this image — it did not have that appearance in the eyepiece. The hazy area of the outer coma is visible, though quite faint. The comet is far to faint for color to show except in enhanced time exposurers such as this.

This was my first attempt to image a comet in color. I used two separate alignments. One was stacked using median combine aligned on the stars and the other aligned on the comet. This way you end up with an image of only the comet with some faint star streaks in the background. The other image is of the stars with a very faint blur of the comet moving through. Photoshop was then used to align the star field and the comet with one of the originals. I’m not sure I like the technique. It seems to be bordering on total fabrication as the separate stacked comet image is simply positioned on the background star images.

Images taken with Celestron Nexstar11 telescope, F6.3 focal reducer, and Canon Xti camera at cassegrain focus. Exposures were 20 seconds at ISO 1600, unguided. Images aligned and stacked with ImagePlus, and then enhanced, positioned, and color adjusted with Photoshop. A larger version 1280×1024 without the text annotation is available.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Astronomy, Comets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.