Tuttles ion tail and coma

[tornado33]

Hi all
Had a brilliant night for imaging last night.
Got Comet Tuttle, now well placed for southern observers
7x2mins ISO1600. Houghys cooled Canon 350d DSLR, sensor temp round 7 degrees C. 10 inch f5.6 newtonian, off axis hand guided on a guidestar, images aligned on comet before stacking. Theres a hint of a shell of material on opposite side from the tail.
Comet was seen easily in the viewfinder
Scott

[Outbackmanyep]

Bloody Fantastic!

[iceman (Mike)]

Brilliant work Scott!

[tornado33]

Thanks all
Will use the 300mm lens from Bert tonight, hopefully will get a nice tail.
Scott

[theodog (Jeff)]

Nice one Scott,
Tail is clearly seen.
Might go out and have a look myself tonight.

[sheeny (Al)]

Superb, Scott!

Al.

[Alchemy (Clive)]

Thats an absolute beauty , im going to go have a look myself tonight , none of the pics ive seen til now has encouraged me to try to image it, its the first obvious tail ive seen, the colors good too.

Could you expand on the images aligned before stacking bit... what program did you use and how ( currently i use deepsky stacker and i expect the comet would just get smeared).... thanks in advance for a reply.

[CoombellKid]

Excellent!!! love the dot dot dot... effect on the stars it makes as though
your looking through falling stars.... or that might be just me lol. Top shot!!!

regards,CS

[h0ughy (David)]

I now have to get out the alcohol so as to remove the texta from the screen where I was doing a dot to dot. Fantastic result Mr Alder

[circumpolar (Matt)]

Great image Scott! Nice to see the tail.
You're right about Friday night be good.

[tornado33]

Thanks all
Alchemy, I use Iris to do both the dark subtraction/flatfielding and aligning/stacking. It has several ways of aligning, the simplest is one star align wher I draw a box around a single star, it will then attempt to align on that star in all the images, however it needs to not have other bright stars in the box I draw. In this case I drew the box round the centre of the comet, the stellarlike core was what Iris aligned on, ignoring the background stars.

Here is a shot from last night, using the 300mmf2.8 flourite lens from Bert. Conditions nowhere near as good as the pervious night, but the CLS filter and fast f ratio helped
5x3mins ISO1600, Houghys cooled camera and CLS filter
Theres a gap in the trailed stars as I had to stop for a bit when cloud came through
Scott

[fringe_dweller]

the usual suberb work Scott!

[rumples riot]

That first image is really nice. Tail extension is great.

[Ric]

Great image Scott, the tail looks wonderful.

A fine effort.

[Garyh]

Absolutely excellent images Scott!
Top work!