Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Draco (Dra)  ·  Contains:  Solar system body or event
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C/2022 E3 (ZTF) passing NGC 5894, Rob Foster
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C/2022 E3 (ZTF) passing NGC 5894

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
C/2022 E3 (ZTF) passing NGC 5894, Rob Foster
Powered byPixInsight

C/2022 E3 (ZTF) passing NGC 5894

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Passing in the same field of view as NGC 5894, a splinter galaxy in Draco, this particular image of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) with its well-documented antitail was a labor of love, because both the image capture and the image processing were challenging.  Shot in the early morning of January 23 thru a fairly constant barrage of high cirrus clouds, the resulting image is otherwise softer than it would have been.  Special thanks to @Debra Ceravolo for sharing her imaging advice, because I ended up shooting this at iso 3200, and suspect would have missed much of the ion tail if I shot at my customary iso 800.  The initial background was diffusely bright with soft details. During pre-processing, I could not get local normalization to work at all, until changing the scale evaluation method from PSF Flux Evaluation to Multiscale Analysis, then it worked like a charm.  Not sure why it failed with  PSF Flux Evaluation scale evaluation method, but suspect the large, highly variable and moving PSF of the comet core was the reason.  The final processed image was a hybrid solution, and another special thanks to @Adam Block for his tutorials and for providing near-real-time updates in his Horizons series; invaluable.  The star field was best obtained using the WBPP end integration to preserve NGC 5894.  After using StarXTerminator, cleaning up the background by removing the Canon Bands and the comet residual, separate HT stretches of the star field and the galaxy field from the starless image were then recombined in the non-linear state using the Substitute With Preview script to reintroduce the galaxy into the star field.   The comet was separately developed using the new CometAlignment tool, and it ended up looking better combined with the star field described above as opposed the the comet-subtracted then integrated star field.  the background of the comet-only image was OK but as is usually the case, contained distracting residual star trails that were easily controlled with a range mask and application of MMT in the non-linear state.   

I am not sure, but on the right side of the splinter galaxy, when you zoom in you can see a "glow". At first, I wondered if that could be residua of a Type II supernova SN 2022pgf discovered on July 22, 2022, by the ZTF survey. Further image reviews of that event show that SN 200pgf occurred at the opposite end of the galaxy, and I doubt the small white dot seen on that left side of the galaxy is the residual glow;  probably not realistic with the Esprit 100 optical train but fun to think about. 

Whew. Looking to processing something other than a comet, even though I was able to obtain great data with much better framing of the ion tail and without any clouds a few nights later....

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C/2022 E3 (ZTF) passing NGC 5894, Rob Foster