My attempt at Two Comets

[WolfieGlos]

I managed to image on Monday evening with that pesky Full Moon, in an attempt to capture Comets C/2022 E3 (ZTF) and C/2022 U2 (Atlas) near to Almaaz in Auriga (bright star bottom left). But Comet processing is new to me, this is the first comet image I've taken...and I jumped in at the deep end with two of them! I think a lot of people at the minute are trying to learn the processing, and getting a sharp star background and comet is proving challenging.

Deep sky stacker just doesn't ever give me a usable result on any of the 3 settings. But I managed to get a decent result with Siril, just following their tutorial.

Below is a screengrab where I've stacked the stars, Comet 2022 E3 and C2022 U2 separately in Siril, run a basic asinh and auto histogram on each in Siril, and then overlayed them in GIMP. No other processing. If I could only figure out how to remove the star trails from the comet images I would be much happier with it, but if not, I'll stick to the star trailing image. I'm hoping to process this a bit more and see if I can get the tail to show up (it's there but very faint, think it's the Moon effect...).

Canon 77D, 64 x 90s at ISO-400. 50x flats and bias, 9x darks. Version below with sharp stars, and the stack on just C2022 E3 ZTF, which also shows Atlas.

Comments and assistance welcome 🙂

 

Edited February 8, 2023 by WolfieGlos

[happy-kat]

It's great to capture but it's proving tricky to process I am finding for my data. There's lots of motion in your second image, shows the comet moving.

What I can share that I found using siril working through to registration I register on global stars then I stacked then I went back to registration and chose comet and marked the two points and then stacked and my stack was aligned on both the comet and stars. I need to figure out my data comet oddity on the comet but your data may vary.

 

 

 

Edited February 9, 2023 by happy-kat