Image & Animation of Comet E3 ZTF

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AstroGeek
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Image & Animation of Comet E3 ZTF

Unread post by AstroGeek »

If you haven't seen it yet, what are you WAITING for??
Peak viewing of this comet is happening for the next several days, until the moon interferes.
I was out during the wee hours of January 24th.
My current imaging rig is a CCD camera attached to a 3-inch refractor.
I took 1-minute exposures in succession for 90 minutes, from 3:45 to 5:15am
Below, you can see these images strung together to create an animation.
A single satellite zips past in one of the frames.
And you might be able to see edge-on galaxy NGC 5894, standing on end, at the bottom center. Magnitude 12.7
The comet shows off a wide dust tail, in addition to a very long, thin ion tail. Do you see them both?

AAA Comet E3 ZTF gif.gif
AAA Comet E3 ZTF gif.gif (9.74 MiB) Viewed 582 times
I also took all 90 frames and used DeepSky Stacker to match up the comet position in each.
Processing comets is rather difficult.
But anyhow, here is the best depiction I could muster.
Dust tail, ion tail, and that peculiar anti-tail aimed towards the sun (an illusion)

COMET FINAL copy.jpg
COMET FINAL copy.jpg (241.96 KiB) Viewed 582 times
Steve L
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Pete
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Re: Image & Animation of Comet E3 ZTF

Unread post by Pete »

Lovely work Steve. Your mono camera is a good 3X more sensitive than my OSC but even then I'm impressed with what you got out of 60 sec exposures. Did you process all 90 frames separately before creating the GIF?
Pete P.
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AstroGeek
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Re: Image & Animation of Comet E3 ZTF

Unread post by AstroGeek »

Hey, thanks Pete.

I used a freeware program called PIPP to create this animation.
I believe that you are already familiar with it.

All 90 .fits files were loaded right into the program.
Then it's a matter of tweaking the settings and seeing the result.
They actually make it pretty easy to see the effects of the changes.

Originally, I thought that I would be stretching each frame individually.
That would probably give a more spectacular result.
But WHO wants to process ninety images individually?
And you have to keep them all rather homogeneous!!
Steve L
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Apollo XX
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Re: Image & Animation of Comet E3 ZTF

Unread post by Apollo XX »

Steve, that animation is perfect and the final outcome reflects exactly the reality of our sky, which of course is gray vs. anything near black. Your GIF is very reminiscent of exactly what I saw while visually observing it at the same time you were imaging it.

Thanks for sharing!

Mike M.
"The purpose of life is the investigation of the Sun, the Moon, and the heavens." - Anaxagoras
rose
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Re: Image & Animation of Comet E3 ZTF

Unread post by rose »

Beautiful image Steve! Thanks for sharing . Hopefully we get a good night to observe from Rehoboth so I can see it through Binoculars. Rose
Rose A.
Meade 6" LXD55 scope on lx200 tripod with a unistar light mount
8"Meade LX200 Classic scope on a Bresser EXOS2 Goto mount
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