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Comets 213 Van-Ness and C2009 F4 McNaught
Hi all,
The other night I decided to start interweiving my supernova runs with regular observations of all comets mag 20 or brighter. There's currently 46 fitting that criteria and within suitable RA & Dec ranges.
I'm doing 5 x 2mins on each comet. That lets me easily get through them in a night, with a couple of hours to spare.
A couple that showed up nicely:
213 Van-Ness and;
C/2009 F4 McNaught
.. were the only two that showed vaguely interesting form. Others were either insignificant dots or there were problems wih the imaging of them.
The images aren't great, trailing in one direction or the other and not perfect focus. Still got some refining to do on the setup.
Van-Ness has a decent sized tail on it! A more illongated nucleus than I'm used to in a comet also, perhaps due to its movement but it isn't moving that fast. Wouldn't mind doing a longer exposure sometime.
Some tech details of the pics..
5 x 2mins each
0.86 arc sec/pixel
Fl~2180
Clear filter with ST7ME.
Unguided.
I'm looking forward to continuing this and building up a nice history of the comets appearances over months.
Roger.
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