Cygnus Widefield with an Unexpected Guest (Brian Fulda)

Cygnus Widefield with an Unexpected Guest

Once a year, I spend a week at a high elevation research station with my astronomy club. I had an ambitious goal in mind this year: a 9-panel mosaic of the Cygnus region. I knew it would be a challenge, but I didn't realize how much — for 4 of the 7 nights we were there, the sky was entirely clouded over. We have a specific morning we have to leave, and I finished the mosaic just in time with an hour to spare on my last night there.

Once I got home, as I was digging through the subframes, I noticed a small green blob in one of the panels. I knew right away from past experience that it was a comet...but which one? I had to look up recent comets and their orbits to find out. Turns out it was Comet C/2023 E1 (ATLAS), and I didn't plan for it to be in my image at all. You can see it just barely made it in the lower left corner.

I'll be sharing a video about my adventure to this high elevation site soon, but in case you want to check out last year's journey, you can watch it here!

Sacramento Valley Astronomical Society

Please note: The following tables are updated every 24 hours.

Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	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.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8377068
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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