Comet Lovejoy at Warp Factor 9

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

With all the talk recently of the "old fashioned" way of presenting the comet with the stars trailed, here's my take..."warp factor 9"

Shot from the ASNSW site last night with my Canon 1100D attached to a WO Zenithstar 71mm riding on an EQ6.

Give or take, this is 36 minutes of 60s subs at ISO6400. As you can see, the core is overblown at 60 seconds and I managed to drop a couple of frames due to an issue with my intervalometer but the tail is way way off the charts!

[nebulosity. (Jo)]

That's fantastic Dunk!

The tail certainly is pretty long, from a few wide field shots I've done I'd estimate it to be around 10/12 degrees!

Cheers
Jo

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Thanks Jo! Yeah I've just seen some of the spectacular comet images posted in the last couple of days and the tail looks really really long, my little scope didn't stand a chance

[PeterEde (Peter)]

Really nice shot
I like'm natual

[raymo]

Great job Dunk; how did you manage to image at 6400? Even at 1600 my
images are as much noise as signal, virtually unusable, and even Neatimage does little to improve them.
raymo

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Thanks Peter, raymo!

I wouldn't normally go near 6400, but I was up on the tablelands and it was only about 15C, and thought I'd experiment. Only short exposures, so I'm sure that helps.

Even so, the individual frames have pretty horrendous noise. It's just I used 30+ frames, and as many darks. I wish I'd taken more lights, but still...

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Excellent! I really like it. Makes me want to go back to trails again.

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Thanks Kevin! I've tried to de-trail it (using DSS) and I'm not convinced that the tail is quite the same. Ah well

[ralph1]

Warp factor 9. Like it. It reminds me of an image I saw once with the focal length changed throughout the exposure and centred on a bright star. Maybe an idea to experiment with?

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Thanks Ralph! That's an interesting idea