Comet 46P, the Pleiades, and the California Nebula (lefty7283)

Comet 46P, the Pleiades, and the California Nebula

Even though I didn't bring any scopes home from school I decided to go after comet 46P with my camera lens. The FOV was perfect for capturing the Pleiades Cluster and the California Nebula as the comet was near both. An animation of the comet moving over the course of ~4h 20m can be [found here](https://i.imgur.com/7UAMw7C.gifv). I ended up with 20 second download times for the images because I had to daisy chain together a couple cheap USB cables after forgetting my 80 footer. Also my dumbass polar aligned on the wrong star, which resulted in a lot of field rotation in my first hour of imaging. My dew heater also came unplugged after fixing the polar alignment, resulting in several frames being tossed. Both of these can be seen in [this unaligned animation of my light frames](https://i.imgur.com/Reg47MG.gifv). Throwing in an [annotated version](https://i.imgur.com/adnd2ZG.jpg) because why not at this point? Captured on December 16th, 2018 from a Bortle 6 zone.

**Equipment:**

* Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8

* Orion Sirius EQ-G

* Canon Rebel T3i (Astro modified)

* Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope

* ZWO ASI120MC for guiding

* Bell's Best Brown Ale for sitting outside and stargazing while imaging

**Acquisition:** 2 hours 33 minutes

* Lights- 102x90" at ISO 800 (Lens at 50mm and f/5.6)

* Darks-15

* Flats- 0

* Bias- 100

**Capture Software:**

* EQMod mount control. Captured using [N.I.N.A.](https://bitbucket.org/Isbeorn/nina) and PHD2 for guiding and dithering

**[PixInsight Processing](https://i.imgur.com/00f0Qvo.png):**

* CosmeticCorrection

* BatchPreProcessing

* CometAlignment

* ImageIntegration (one for star aligned images and one for comet aligned images)

* **StarStack:**

* AutomaticBackgroundExtraction

* DynamicCrop

* CanonBandingReduction

* **Comet Stack:**

* AutomaticBackgroundExtraction

* LinearFit to StarStack_ABE

* DymanicCrop

* CanonBandingReduction

* PixelMath (Mask of only the comet applied to StarStack. Added CometStack to StarStack)

* AutomaticBackgroundExtraction

* BackgroundNeutralization

* ColorCalibration

* TVGDenoise

* MultiscaleMedianTransform

* SCNR

* ArcsinhStretch

* HistogramTransformation

* ACDNR

* LRGBCombination (For chrominance noise reduction)

* [Curves](https://i.imgur.com/lG0zd0w.jpg)Transformation

* Annotation

/r/astrophotography

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

	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

	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

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3141132
PixInsight job	MUJKACVC2GNHQCQ8XUYE5UETGCP5IKQE
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	03h59m02s.8
RA (top/left)	03h21m55s.8
RA (top/right)	03h33m59s.9
RA (bottom/right)	04h29m07s.7
RA (bottom/left)	04h30m33s.6

Dec (center)	+30°26′25″
Dec (top/left)	+40°12′31″
Dec (top/right)	+19°31′14″
Dec (bottom/right)	+20°09′30″
Dec (bottom/left)	+41°02′44″

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