Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn)  ·  Contains:  Solar system body or event
The Spectral Comet, Edoardo Luca Radice (Astroedo)
Powered byPixInsight

The Spectral Comet

The Spectral Comet, Edoardo Luca Radice (Astroedo)
Powered byPixInsight

The Spectral Comet

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

This winter, in addition to a bit of cold, is bringing us a surprise: Comet C / 2021 A1 (Leonard).

It could even reach the Naked eye visibility  threshold in the next few days (obviously under dark skies, certainly not in our twilight cities).

Therefore all of us amateur astronomers and astrophotographers are in fibrillation: it does not often happen to be able to see and photograph such bright comets.

So why not participate in this CCH? (Collective Cometary Hysteria).

Photographing from the city, however, the quality of my images could never reach the levels of my noble colleagues taking pictures under dark skies and here is the idea, a little bit odd but effective:

Why not take advantage of the comet's motion to obtain something original?

And here it is at my "Spectral Comet": obviously this is not a real spectrum: as you can see the stars are perfectly normal.
Here the dispersion of cometary light occurred thanks to its movement.
Shooting objects with a black and white camera, the only way to reconstruct the colors is taking three series of images with Red, Green and Blue filters, but while the stars remain still, and therefore their images in the three colors overlap creating a normal RGB image.
But the comet moves and therefore its images appear not to overlap creating a colored track: red at the beginning, then, when the filter changes, it becomes green and finally, at the last filter change it becomes blue.

So this is, in fact, an extremely raw spectra of our Christmas comet which, we hope, will give us a good show in the next few days.

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

The Spectral Comet, Edoardo Luca Radice (Astroedo)

In these collections

MSI Ambassador