Comet Jacques Moving Past the Garnet Star

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Just put together an animated GIF of Comet Jacques moving through Cepheus from the subs I took on the 31st August. The nebula on the left is IC1396, home of the Elephant Trunk.

It's appearance is almost circular as its tail was pointing away from the Earth at the time. It shows 48 minutes of movement against the starfield. Each frame is a 2 minute sub taken with my 135mm Super-Takumar lens.

I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to create the GIF, I just converted all the subs and loaded them into a new GIMP image as layers. I then deleted the background layer, cropped the image and selected Filter->Animation->Playback. Then I used Filter->Animation->Optimize(For GIF) and exported as GIF with the animation box ticked. As a bonus I think its showing up the periodic error in my mount. I'd expect the image to drift as I discovered the other day that my polar scope is misaligned, but the drift seems to stutter. I really need to try stripping it down.

Here's the result of the final stack, 30 minutes of data:

The comet appears a bit streaky as I was unable to get the comet + stars mode to work in DSS and had to blend two separate stacks, I'd like to fix it if I can. Looking at the image again, I might boost the saturation some more.

Hope you like the animation. From the speed Jacques is moving at you can see how lucky I was to catch it right by the Garnet Star. While I imaged it once previously by the Double Cluster I had no idea it was in Cepheus when I trained my camera on IC1396.

[Dave In Vermont]

Wow! Very good capture! Keep going.

Clear & Dark Skies,

Dave

[Pete Presland]

very nice, is that with the 250mm?

[happy-kat]

Love the animation really feels like a comet now

[Zul]

amazing!

[mariosi]

Fabulous!

Clear Skies always

Marios

[Ruud]

Super!

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Thanks for the comments. I'll try and sort out the colour balance in the animation sometime but I'll probably need to use another program as GIMP only supports 8 bit images. I've reprocessed the final image now, here is the new version:

And a closer crop that shows up the Elephant Trunk more clearly.

[Scooot]

That's great, really enjoyed the animation.

[laser_jock99]

Excelent work.