How many of those can you make across a good session?
one every 5 - 15mins would make an interesting animation.
Perhaps to catch dynamic actions in the ion tail. need about 20 frames..
I am going to give it a go this weekend as well. Any advice on sub lengths on this rapidly moving object. I suppose I need to guide on the comet itself?
Thanks Alan I can notice movement after each exposure ATM as the Comet is moving quite quickly.
Glen, the exposure above is a single 300 second shot with an 8300 CCD, a 102mm refractor working at 610mm, if you blow it up you can see slight elongation in the core. I have another set of 5 X 50 second exposures I have yet to process so I will see how that pans out. The above shot was taken mainly to Invert and get some detail of the tail. I tracked on the stars, if you use PHD2 I believe you can track on the Comet itself. Hope that helps a little.
The latest Comet Lovejoy imaged from the outer suburbs of Sydney last night, 18-19 December 2014. The best sub-frames were recorded after midnight when many people had switched off their LED Christmas lights and other floodlights. The first image is a simple average of 30 x 3 minute sub-frames recorded starting at midnight. Sigma clipping was used for the second image. The second image was over-stretched to emphasise very faint tails. Notice the very broad and exceedingly faint tail almost horizontal in the image. I count at least 6 different tails. Not bad considering how bright the sky was in Sydney last night.
Technical details: Televue NP127is at f/5.2, QSI683wsg camera with Astronomik Luminance filter, 3 minute sub-frames, 30 for the “average” image and 63 for the “sigma clipping” image.
you have 3 minute subs, if you can make one look like John's image, then try to make an animation of all your images. No need to align them. But you may need to logscale or stretch the images to see the tail a bit better.
I would be interested to see if the result shows tail dynamics
Doesn't matter if it does not look perfect....
kind regards, Alan
The tail is quite different every night. A very dynamic object indeed.
I saw it for the first time Friday night and i will certainly be watching this one closely. What is the current magnitude estimate & how bright is it expected to get ?
I saw it for the first time Friday night and i will certainly be watching this one closely. What is the current magnitude estimate & how bright is it expected to get ?