Before the cloud moved into tonight managed to get 11 x 30 second exposures of Elenin with an 8" f2.1 scope + QHY9 camera. The attached image is a crop showing over a degree of tail.
Visual observations at the moment are indicating the comet is around magnitude 8 (however, the light pollution prevents me from observing the comet)
Before the cloud moved into tonight managed to get 11 x 30 second exposures of Elenin with an 8" f2.1 scope + QHY9 camera. The attached image is a crop showing over a degree of tail.
Terry
Cropped and still a degree of tail!!! That's what happens when you have an F2.1 scope I suppose. Great shot, Terry.
Yes thats the Hyperstar Dave. btw the total field of view is 2.5 x 1.8 degrees with the QHY9 so makes a great comet imager. However, might be getting out the wider angle lenses for this comet soon as the tail grows.
Great catch, Terry. I've never shot any comets and was recently reading how to process the fast moving comet images. I'll have to give it a try, as soon as the weather clears around here.
I imagine I would take 2 lots of images. One short for the stars and autoguided, the other longer of the comet and I guess you'd have to autoguide on the comet itself as the guide star if you could in order for it not to blur. Or take as long an image you could of the comet before it moves too much and take lots of them and stack them.
Then in Photoshop you would delete all the stars in the comet long exposure and then add the stars image as a layer in lighten mode the stars would shine through. You probably would have to delete the blurred comet out of the stars image with the clone tool and clean any leftovers with the healing tool.
Look how fine that tail is. 
