Comet Tsuchinan-ATLAS - Monday 23rd September

[OzEclipse (Joe Cali)]

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

[joshman (Josh)]

Very nice Joe!


I was up at 4am again this morning to image the comet with both setups again. I'll have a play with stacking them tonight after work. I think I managed at least ~20-30 minutes again with each scope. If the weather holds over night, tomorrow morning will be my last chance to image it before perihelion.

[OzEclipse (Joe Cali)]

Hi Josh. Look forward to seeing your results.
I have three days of cloud one of them with rain. If I drive an hour south I should get clear skies Friday morning and clear here Saturday morning. Then looking forward maybe Monday to Wednesday next week also clear.

Weather forecasts are more reliable and accurate out here on the plains. Remarkably so. No convective ground coupled weather to contend with.

Good luck tomorrow.

Cheers

Joe

[joshman (Josh)]

Originally Posted by OzEclipse

Hi Josh. Look forward to seeing your results.
I have three days of cloud one of them with rain. If I drive an hour south I should get clear skies Friday morning and clear here Saturday morning. Then looking forward maybe Monday to Wednesday next week also clear.

Weather forecasts are more reliable and accurate out here on the plains. Remarkably so. No convective ground coupled weather to contend with.

Good luck tomorrow.

Cheers

Joe

Thanks Joe, I had a go at briefly processing it up last night, I had to manually stack it because WBPP rejected too many frames, and didn't do a good job of stacking. I think I got a lot more detail in the core, and the tail definitely looks a bit longer and seems to have changed shape a little bit (or i was able to process it better).
I was able to image again this morning; my last opportunity for the next 10+ days or so with the weather forecast being what it, but even then, i think October 14 is likely the next chance i'll get to see it, right on sunset, low in the West.