Comet and Jupiter 13.9.22

[Mickoid]

Set up early on Tuesday night and got another chance at Panstarrs before the moon came up. This is now heading toward the sun so sits in the western part of the sky, which from my location, competes with Melbourne's light dome. I had all sorts of issues with gradients with this one, exasperated by not shooting Flats and not using a Coma Corrector as I was set up for Planetary for later on. This is nearly 15mins of integration and the comet nucleus shows some elongation due to its movement over that time. I shot this with an 8 inch Newt and a Canon 550d, 20 second exposures at 1600 iso. Using the same scope, I had the ASI 224mc for Jupiter once it had climbed high enough above my roofline to shoot. Seeing was mostly poor with fleeting moments of better seeing, just as a tease.

[Averton]

Great captures and animation Michael.

[Dave882]

Great stuff!! The animation is fantastic!

[Mickoid]

Thanks P and C and Dave, glad you liked them. The animation is fairly time consuming to generate, maybe there's an easier way of producing them to the way I do it. Two issues that stand out are getting each frame to look the same and reducing the GIF to under 200kbs without it being too small to view. Even with the care I took with this one, the colour balance varies slightly between frames, not to mention seeing conditions for each frame can vary considerably over the capture duration. The result is an old movie film type look! :)

[Averton]

It's definitely incredibly difficult to get animations under the 200kB limit. You did well!