I was completely mesmerized yesterday to see these exposures of the Ion tail dancing around from frame to frame. It had been very windy the night before and so imaging with the newt wasn't really a goal, but wanted to keep grabbing data on this comet and hoped for the best. The seeing conditions were pretty bad as you can see the stars change in size quite drastically from frame to frame, but the skies really clear... Really wish the 50% moon wasn't up though.
This video of the comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was taken on the morning of 2023-01-15 between 3:00am and 6:30am. The comet was 28 degrees above the horizon at the start of the sequence, and rose to an altitude of 66 degrees at the end of astro-dark. The sequence consists of 53x90s exposures taken with an 8in f5 Newtonian reflector sequenced using Nighttime Imaging in Astronomy (
https://nighttime-imaging.eu/). Each exposure was then calibrated with bias and flat frames, aligned using star alignment and then those were aligned using comet alignment all in pixinsight. StarXterminator was used in batch mode to produce the starless revision. Each frame was cropped, noise reduced, stretched and then combined in PIPP.
For full resolution with a higher stretch, check the MP4 linked here:
https://www.darkflats.com/Comets/C2022%20E3%20ZTF%20Night8_L_53x90s.Full.Starless.Full.mp4
Comments