Astro: Comet Lulin

I'm not much of a comet imager and weather here is awful. I tried a
couple nights ago even though very light snow was falling. There was a
north wind so with the dew shield it wasn't hitting the corrector. Sky
was allowing a few stars down to 2nd magnitude through. So I gave it a
try. Only got a very limited amount of data. Maybe 2 minutes per color
for the stars and maybe 6 minutes total on the comet, one red, 2 green
and 3 blue one minute shots. I shot the stars tracking sidereal rate
and the comet tracking using its predicted motion relative to the
sidereal rate. Something The Sky and a Paramount does very easily.
This is a pure RGB. I'd take a RGB series then take another. Clouds
made many of the series unusable. In all I took data over 2 hours to
get 12 minutes I used and that was split 6 on stars (2 each color) and 6
on the comet as detailed above. I didn't have enough data to use a
sigma reject to get rid of the stars on the comet photo so had to do
that with the clone tool. Same for getting rid of the comet on the star
field shot. That was very time consuming. Not worth the work I'm afraid.

Taken with 3x3 binning for 1.5" per pixel. Cropped as the comet moved a
long way during this time and overlap is not all that great.

Rick
--
Correct domain name is arvig and it is net not com. Prefix is correct.
Third character is a zero rather than a capital "Oh".

Very nice image of the comet, in spite of the bad conditions. Looks like I
will miss this one, more bad weather is forecast for the next week.

Stefan

"Rick Johnson" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
ster.com...
I'm not much of a comet imager and weather here is awful. I tried a
couple nights ago even though very light snow was falling. There was a
north wind so with the dew shield it wasn't hitting the corrector. Sky
was allowing a few stars down to 2nd magnitude through. So I gave it a
try. Only got a very limited amount of data. Maybe 2 minutes per color
for the stars and maybe 6 minutes total on the comet, one red, 2 green
and 3 blue one minute shots. I shot the stars tracking sidereal rate
and the comet tracking using its predicted motion relative to the
sidereal rate. Something The Sky and a Paramount does very easily.
This is a pure RGB. I'd take a RGB series then take another. Clouds
made many of the series unusable. In all I took data over 2 hours to
get 12 minutes I used and that was split 6 on stars (2 each color) and 6
on the comet as detailed above. I didn't have enough data to use a
sigma reject to get rid of the stars on the comet photo so had to do
that with the clone tool. Same for getting rid of the comet on the star
field shot. That was very time consuming. Not worth the work I'm afraid.

Taken with 3x3 binning for 1.5" per pixel. Cropped as the comet moved a
long way during this time and overlap is not all that great.

Rick
--
Correct domain name is arvig and it is net not com. Prefix is correct.
Third character is a zero rather than a capital "Oh".