I saw that the comet was going to traverse a field of Galaxies on Sunday morning, so I set up a sequence to try and capture it. I actually woke up to check it when it started, and I am glad that I did as the 90 second exposure that I wanted to use was too long and the comet was elongating too much. So I changed it to 30 second LRGB and let it run until dawn. First I tried processing it with the previous Comet align and the normal SXT star removal on all of the Comet aligned images. Then when the new Comet align came out, I tried a new approach. I integrated the star aligned LUM image, then did SXT to get a star master that I could use to subtract the stars during the comet align process. This actually worked just as well, if not better than running SXT on all of the images but took much less processing time.
Then I had to use SXT on the star aligned RGB image to both get the stars, but also the background galaxies. So then I did the usual processing on the comet, and then added the galaxies back to the starless galaxy using a GAME script mask and PixelMath.
The comet has changed dramatically from a few nights previously as the tail detached the night before. But I really like the "Anti-tail" and the bullet coma shape. After this, I am going to try
@Adam Block 's new approach with using the Sun as the SPCC reference which I think might add some color to the dust.
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