Comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy, 7 Jan 2015, stacked (David Dearden)

Comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy, 7 Jan 2015, stacked

After much struggling, this is my attempt to stack my comet subframes. I did all the stacking in Nebulosity, attempting to align on the nucleus. I shouldn't have needed to do much aligning, as I was also guiding on the nucleus. I then standard deviation clip-stacked; this gets rid of some of the star trailing. Stacking does bring up a lot more of the tail than in my single frame image. I then stacked again, on the stars. I used the filter feature in StarTools to remove the nucleus' trail. I put the star image layer on top of the comet in Photoshop, then set its opacity at 50%. I'm not sure I like the result, but here it is.

B is just the comet, with star trails and a little more stretching (no star field). Some nice dust bunny cleanup was done by my son-in-law, Eric Mansfield, using GIMP.

Original
Final
B

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Distribution of astrophotographers

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

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	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

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	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

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Status	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	497962
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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