C/2021 A1 (Our Leonard) (Bea Budai & Zsolt Paragi)

C/2021 A1 (Our Leonard)

We got interested in astrophotography when Neowise came last year. This time we were fully prepared! The weather did not cooperate though. On the night of 8 December, I was wondering whether I should set up and polar align the telescope because the next morning we had a slight chance of clear skies. But it did not look very promising, and I also didn't have an idea whether the comet would rise above the four-story building to our East by 6 am (it was cloudy for weeks, I had no way to check). We went to bed disappointed.

I woke up at 5:30 am on 9 December. Looked out, and saw the stars. Arcturus was quite high and I realized: this is our chance! For a moment I could not decide: do we have enough time to prepare? Had a quick coffee and started packing out. This was probably the fastest ever setting up the telescope, piling up our garden furniture to block the closest street lights, cool the camera, polar align, get in focus, go to target and refine the framing. Leonard was already visible in the guide scope! Bea joined me and we started shooting around 6:45 am, using 1-min subs. But when we zoomed in it was too long even for our 384mm focus, so we stopped after 10 images: the combination of these you see here. We masked the most inner part of the core to hide its trail.

We started shooting 30x30s subs around 7:00 am. To our surprise, it was the period when the comet occulted HIP 75795, it was so exciting to watch! In the meantime, the field brightened significantly so it is not clear what can we do with it, but we are experimenting with a movie.

I love this hobby for all that it takes! The previous days were very stressful at work and I should have spent my time preparing for an important meeting. This morning instead completely refreshed my mind and made me forget all my troubles, and I even had a very successful day in the end.

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5319330
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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C/2021 A1 (Our Leonard)

C/2021 A1 (Our Leonard)

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