Comet 2007 E2 Lovejoy - 2 hr animated gif

[Dennis]

Hello,

Here is an (almost) 2 hour animation of Comet 2007 E2 Lovejoy, discovered by CometGuy (Terry). WARNING: 1.3Meg.

Equipment:
Vixen 102mm f9 refractor at prime focus on an EM200 mount.
SBIG ST7E CCD camera. FOV 26x17 arc min.
50 exposures of 2 minutes each.
Auto guided using a WO 66mm F6 and Orion Deep Space Star Shoot ccd.

Processing:
Images acquired in CCDSoft, Darks and Flats in MIRA AP, Aligned in CCDSoft, Batch processed and resampled down in Corel PhotoPaint, AVI in K3CCDTools, Animated gif in Advanced gif Animator.

Brisbane, Qld, Australia. 16th April 2007.
Start capture: 03:15am AEST (GMT+10)
End capture: 05:11am AEST (GMT+10)
Image centred at: RA: 19h 38m 52s. Dec: -13°50' 29".
Image scale: 2 arcsec/pixel

The animated gif is a little grainy due to:

• Thermal noise – I had to cut back on the cooling due to the ccd frosting up (the desiccant needs a bake).
• Thin clouds moving across the FOV during the imaging session.
• Raising the black point to allow for maximum compression.
• Rusty operator!

Cheers

Dennis

[middy]

Fantastic work Dennis!!

I look forward to seeing it again on APOD/Spaceweather in a few days time.

[CometGuy]

Well done Dennis, looks good even shows the short tail.

Terry

[iceman (Mike)]

That's fantastic Dennis! Very well done. I love it.

[Dennis]

Thanks guys – here is a combined image of the 50 sub-frames, showing the path of the nucleus. The gap in the middle was due to clouds. Note how much smoother the background looks, due to the improved Signal to Noise ratio from combining 50 x 2 minute sub-frames.

Cheers

Dennis

[iceman (Mike)]

That's amazing Dennis. I love it when you do this type of work, like you did with the asteroids etc last year.

Excellent!

[h0ughy (David)]

well done Dennis!

[matt]

That's excellent, Dennis.

You should submit that to Spaceweather and other sites capable of displaying animation

[RB (Andrew)]

I love it !!!
Awesome work Dennis.

[Dennis]

Once again, thank you for your nice comments. I used CCDSoft and The Sky combined, to auto generate an inventory of stars in the stacked image – a nice feature of the two software products when working together.

I located a magnitude 19.04 star – not bad for a 4” refractor from a Brisbane back yard on a night of poor transparency, with a rusty telescope operator!

Cheers

Dennis

PS – the screen prints are heavily resampled and compressed to meet the file size guidelines.

[Outbackmanyep]

THATS AWESOME! well done!

Cheers!

[davidpretorius]

Dennis, you are one talented individual!

awesome!

[Starkler (Geoff)]

Top stuff Dennis , you never fail to impress

[Ric]

Fantastic Dennis.

Totally impressive