Two comets on Saturday morning

[mcrowle]

Thursday into Friday was my first clear night of 2023, but due to an early start for work I left the comets for the early hours of Saturday morning which were also expected to be clear.

I targeted Comet C/2022 A2 PanSTARRS first, as I'd not seen it before and wanted to add it to my list  . It was easily located in Draco, with reference to the chart on Heavens-above.com, via my 300mm Newtonian. I swapped the eyepiece for the camera and ended up with 16 x 1-minute unguided exposures at ISO 3200, after deleting those spoilt by periodic error.

While those frames were being taken, I located C/2022 E3 ZTF between Hercules and Ursa Major using 7x50 binocs. For this comet I obtained 22 x 1-minute exposures.

Later on Saturday I stacked on the comets in Deep Sky Stacker, and processed the results in the Canon RAW software and Cyberlink PhotoDirector.  In due course I may also stack them for both the comets and the stars, though I've had mixed results with that in the past and I do like the way stacking just on the comet shows its movement against the star background.

Regards, Mike

C/2022 A2 PanSTARRS:

C/2022 E3 ZTF:

Edited January 22, 2023 by mcrowle
Typo

[mcrowle]

In the hope of capturing a greater extent of the comet's tails, I then imaged Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) with a Sky-Watcher ED 80mm 'scope.

Not sure it really adds anything, though, as little of the ion tail is visible. Anyway, this was 13 x 3-min auto-guided exposures at ISO 3200, stacked and processed as before.

Regards, Mike.

[Neil_104]

Nice images! I really like this effect with comets, seeing the star trails, gives a good impression of speed and amount of movement across the sky as you say. Plus it's nice for once not to worry about star shapes 😄

[Paul M]

Nicely done and great colours too.

I'm so dissapointed with mysrlf to have not even grabbed this one with the bins yet! Soon hoiefully!