G'day all,
Other than my narrow field shot of Lulin a few months back when Lulin was much smaller (visually) than it is now, this is my first shot of the comet. I probably won't make the time to photograph it again with the moon coming around and all.
I'm quite happy with the photograph considering it's only 5 x 5 minutes of exposures but it's still not a scratch on what some people have been posting of this colourful comet!
The pic is here:
http://www.rogergroom.com/items/comet_c2007_lulin
To take the shots I put the Canon piggyback on the LX200. I don't do that often but every time I do I say to myself I must do it more often. It's just so easy and the LX200 handles it so nicely. Tracking is perfect and autoguiding easy. As compared to the annoying Losmandy GM8 which if I put the camera on it I must re-balance the whole system accurately and then hope the gears aren't too sloppy or too meshy, etc.
It's the first serious image I've taken with my DSLR using Nebulosity2 and my new configuration on my vista laptop. I've done lots of test shots of course, but not a proper one like this. Nebulosity2 is working out great with the Canon. It's so much more tollorant of system failures than DSLRFocus, so much easier to frame and focus, easier to switch between settings. The one down side is that it doesn't have an option to save images captured as RAW files, they instead are saved as FITs files, in my case 3 seperate files for RGB. Apparently that's better, but it makes processing the files a little more teadious.
The combine is done using an add/sum, I thought I'd give it a shot as that's worked better than an average for comets for me in the past. This means there's a little more noise visible but overall I don't mind it. I might try an average sometime to see the difference on this object.
The shot is slightly out off focus I think, but only slightly.
The old shot from a few months back:
http://www.rogergroom.com/items/come..._n3_lulin_LRGB
Roger.
