Vern’s Weblog

Comet C/2006 VZ13 (Linear) was in great position in the upper part of Bootes when the following image was taken early Sunday morning July 15 at  0:42 to 1:02 am MDT. The core visually does not appear as pin point as it does here, an unfortunate result of brightness enhancement and other processing. Nonetheless it is bright and has a large coma. It was easily seen in my 80mm finder. I tried but wasn’t able to locate it with 7×50 binoculars. The ephemeris shows it to be about magnitude 9.8.

Image acquired with Celestron Nexstar11 telescope, F6.3 focal reducer, and Canon Xti camera at Cassegrain focus. Sky was mostly clear, some high thin clouds (about half of the 30 images were rejected), transparency generally quite good despite the high humidity 70%, dew on everything, temperature about 38°F, and absolutely no wind. Location was near Fox Park, WY. Fox Park is the location for next months Weekend Under the Stars (WUTS) star party. See http://home.bresnan.net/~curranm/wuts.html

Thirty images were acquired but only 15 were usable due to thin clouds. Registax4 and ImagePlus were used to dark subtract, flat field correct, align, and stack (8 of 15) images. Composite with Photoshop Elements2.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 3:49 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.