Image of Comet C/2007 F1 (LONEOS) from 7:26 pm MDT this evening, a couple minutes before it disappeared behind a neighbors roof. The comet appears quite large and bright in the TV zoom eyepiece at 24mm, maybe somewhat bluish. I did not see a tail, though there is a hint of one in the below image. Image taken with Canon Xti, 20 sec exposure at ISO1600, F6.3 focal reducer, Celestron Nexstar11 scope.
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.
Here is another image of comet 96P Machholz from last Sunday morning between 2:45 am and 3:20 am. It is getting less bright each day, currently about magnitude +12.5 to +13. Its moving quite fast so its difficult to stack. NGC 7003 was in the same field at the time the images were taken.
Image taken with Celestron Nexstar11 telescope, F3.3 focal reducer, and Stellacam II video camera. Location was Cactus Flats North, 7 miles east of Briggsdale, CO. Temperature was 46°F, no wind, sky was clear, and turbulence about 6/10. Transparency was good although humidity was high — dew everywhere. Registax4 used dark subtact, flat field correct, align, and stack approximately 4 minutes of video. Stellacam set to 10/14 gain, 256 integration (8 sec), and medium gamma.
Comet C/2006 VZ13 (Linear) is located in constellation Andromeda and is about magnitude +13.5 according to recent reports. If so this is the faintest comet I’ve captured thus far. Dark sky certainly helped, I haven’t been able to capture any comets less than mag 13 in the light polluted Denver suburbs.
Image taken around 4:30 to 4:50 am on Sunday May 20, 2007 at Cactus Flats North in the Pawnee National Grasslands 8 miles east of Briggsdale, CO. The sky was clear, transparency was good (humidity was high), no wind, and the temperature around 45°F. Telescope was Celestron Nexstar 11 with F3.3 focal reducer, and Stellacam II video camera. Camera settings were 10/14 gain, medium gamma, 256 integration (8 seconds). Registax4 was used to flat field, dark subtract, align, stack and enhance 8 minutes of video for each of two frames in final image. Animation created with Photoshop2.
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.