Comet 144P/Kushida

[Paul M]

So, in my recent shakedown, post cloudemic on the 30th Nov, I needed to image a comet. My obvious choice was 12P/Pons-Brooks, just alongside Vega.

Unfortunately west isn't my best direction, and by the time I was up and running, the comet was diving into the neighbours roof. I got one sub that indicated an active comet, well worth imaging. But then it was gone:

This is a single 200 sec sub. the mad gradient is the roof

Looking round, the next best candidate was 144P/

Not excitingly bright, and a bright Moon, but well placed. I ran off a bunch of 200 sec subs. The comet is almost stellar in appearance. 

Here it is drifting across the field:

It's the faint track above and left of center.

For those of you that are:

1) still reading

2) like white-knuckle rides

Here is a short, very short animation. I hope you both like it. This is created via the Blink tool in ASTAP, which can save out the blinked subs as an animation/video, but it uses Y4M video format, which doesn't embed in this forum.

Had to jump through some hoops as VLC just returns an empty file when it supposedly converts to MP4. Did it via an online converter. Works well, but £10,000,000 of Bitcoin has since dissapeared from my laptop... 😂🙊 

 

 

 

Edited December 4, 2023 by Paul M