Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Andromeda (And)  ·  Contains:  32 And  ·  35 nu. And  ·  37 mu. And  ·  39 And  ·  43 bet And  ·  45 And  ·  Andromeda  ·  Andromeda galaxy  ·  Great Nebula in Andromeda  ·  M 110  ·  M 31  ·  M 32  ·  Mirach  ·  NGC 205  ·  NGC 206  ·  NGC 221  ·  NGC 224  ·  NGC 272  ·  NGC 404  ·  Part of the constellation Andromeda (And)  ·  The star 32And  ·  The star 39And  ·  The star 45And  ·  The star Mirach (βAnd)  ·  The star μAnd  ·  The star νAnd
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M31 and C/2018 W2 Africano, Santiago Giralt
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M31 and C/2018 W2 Africano

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M31 and C/2018 W2 Africano, Santiago Giralt
Powered byPixInsight

M31 and C/2018 W2 Africano

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Description

One colleague told me that the comet C/2018 W2 Africano was crossing Andromeda constellation and it would pass quite close of M31. I checked that on https://cometografia.es/cometas-visibles/#more-9320 and I saw that it would be possible to photograph both objects together.

The lights acquisition was pretty straightforward but the post-processing has been really difficult. First I tried to use the PixInsight process CometAlignment to obtain both the stars and the comet punctual but it didn't worked as expected. In the "comet-only" picture I always had a significant presence of the M31 core and, in the "stars-only" picture, M31 completely disappeared. Therefore, the final result was a complete disaster when I tried to stack both images.

At the end, I decided to process the lights as usual, without taking into account the comet, and the "comet-only" image separately, and stack them using GIMP. The problem that I found was that it was quite difficult to process the comet since I had no other stars in the image to correctly define its colour. I looked around to other astrophotographers that imaged this comet and I tried to assign the same color to my comet image. That is my only concern about this image. Any suggestion/comment is more than wellcomed!

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