Comet 21P Giacobini-Zinner timelapse

[johnfosteruk]

I've recently signed up to the Slooh.com astronomer package and while you don't have the control and the option to capture any really long subs that you get with iTelescope, you do have potentially 20 hours per day imaging time, unlimited 'missions' (slots) and they've got some pretty decent gear. Their big scope on El Teide doesn't do well in the wind, so you lose a fair amount of subs but what you do get out of it is pretty good. For 20 quid a month you can't go wrong.

While I'm waiting for the big scope to provide some data for a project I'm working on I decided to fill in with this one captured on one of their other rigs.

It's 23 mins in 15x50s subs with their 11" Rowe Ackerman Schmidt Astrograph, details below.

I did 3 versions - colour, mono and inverted. I stretched the mono and invert a fair bit more than the colour for tail detail.

There's vignetting and flicker but for single subs I'm pretty happy. I might run this again and stack pairs to give me a little more processing leeway.

Telescope Manufacturer: Celestron

Effective Aperture: 279mm (11")

Focal Length: 620mm

Native Focal Ratio: f/2.22

Camera Manufacturer: Celestron

Camera Model: Nightscape 8300 Colour

Image Horiz FOV (Arcmin): 99

Image Vert FOV (Arcmin): 75

Image Resolution: 3326x2504

 

 

 

[PaulM]

impressive well done

[wavydavy]

Great stuff...…….loads of work gone into this.

[johnfosteruk]

Thanks Paul and Dave.

For fun I stacked the 15 subs twice, once for the stars, and again for the comet. A bit of processing and then combined them in Photoshop.

There will be a V2 in due course as this has flaws, but it's a start.

[johnfosteruk]

This is just for fun more than anything. Somebody in another dark corner of the web suggested he thought the tail might be curved. So I stretched the living daylights out of the comet luminance layer (the result of aligning on the comet and stacking with kappa-sigma) 

I've overlaid what I think is the curvature.

[tooth_dr]

Funny you should say curved. In my image I noticed the tail does have a distinct curve to it.

 

Nice images and animations ??

[Davey-T]

Got the SWSA and WOZ61 snapping away at it ATM, bit Moony but we'll see.

Dave

[bob-c]

very well done John.

                               bob.