Catalina from Romania

[jimao22]

Hi there,

I didn't post from awhile here so I re-start with this topic.

I did some exposures to Catalina before Christmas, on 23rd and 24th of December. First morning I took 60 sec exposures, not knowing how fast is the comet on the sky and trying to avoid to ruin small details if exposures to long. It wasn't the case, so next morning, I increased the exposure time to 120 sec. I took 54 exposures like this, and here is the result.

My telescope is a MN190/EQ6 w/EQMOD, belt drive, ATIK314L+mono camera with TS OAG.

The images were calibrated with darks, flats and biases in Maxim, then developed in PixInsight and after that, went in StarTools where I erased the stars, used HDR, denoise and contrast.

The second picture was made applying a Larson-Sekanina filter to the image with stars. As you can see, in my first picture some jets appear to erupt from the core but the Larson_Sekanina do not confirm this. Is a bit mysterious because it cannot be artefacts generated by spiders (as you know, MN do not have such a thing).   

I asked a friend of mine to redo the processing and to see what he obtain.

Catalina without stars

Larson-Sekanina 3 degrees rotation and 3 pixels offset.

At the end, you have a short film made from the 54 exposures with the comet traveling between stars.

[paulastro]

Love the animation.

[laudropb]

Nice capture and lovely animation.

[Vega]

Love this, great capture!