comet guiding?

[blink138]

hello members
as always just looking through our members astro photos and wondering how to take pictures of comets?
i know you have to know its coordinates and manually plug them in to your mount
how do you guide a comet and will phd keep track of it when its not moving "normally"?
amount and type of exposure and how long?
anyone had experience at this who can give me an idea would be great
the timelapse on our site was jaw dropping!
pat

[cometcatcher]

If you keep total exposure short, or if the comet is a fair distance from Earth, comets don't need guiding. It's when a comet is at close approach to Earth that it's apparent motion through the sky is greatest, like 168P is presently.

At close approach a comet may show a false nucleus. If so it may be possible to guide on the false nucleus. I'm old school so I do it manually, by eye.

It's also possible to take short sub exposures and set the software to stack by aligning the comet nucleus rather than the stars. I used to use Registax to do this but I've been having trouble these days using it with large files. There may be other software that will do it but I'm still playing catchup on new techniques for doing this myself.

[blink138]

woo hoo thanks for your reply kevin
pat