Comet Tsuchinan-ATLAS - Monday 23rd September
Clear night last night and this morning. I started with a shakedown exposure. The Magellanic Cloud was hanging straight off the deck and I grabbed a sequence of the Tarantula Nebula in Magellanic Cloud. I primarily wanted to check the tracking and balance.
The Tarantula is 12 x 120s exposures tacked but unguided. It came out reasonably well despite having so little integration and so I decided to process it.
I covered the scope and went to bed. Got about 4 hrs sleep then up again at 330am.
Uncovered the scope, calibrated the GOTO. I slewed the telescope to the comet and could see that although the comet had risen, it was still just below my low but not zero, local horizon.
The telescope was set up with a 300mm EDIF lens and APSc Pentax K5 in parallel with my 8" f6.4 Vixen VC200L cassegrain astrograph with the full frame Pentax K1. I first captured an image with the 300mm between 4:40am and 4:50am. Once the comet had gained a little altitude, I started with the 8" scope.
Damn dust bunnies and satellites.
Damn you Elon.
Otherwise pretty happy with my morning's activities. I rendered the 300mm shot in B&W. In the mono conversion process, I boosted some colour channels and restrained others to bring up the anti-tail.
Joe