C/2022 E3 (ZTF), January 15, 2023, between a break in the clouds (Rob Foster)

C/2022 E3 (ZTF), January 15, 2023, between a break in the clouds

Revision title: Using New Comet Alignment Tool, better

Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), Discovered on March 2, 2022 by astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility (thus ZTF) in San Diego, is a non-periodic comet (thus C in the designation, as opposed a periodic comet, which is designated as P) thought to originate from the Oort cloud, having last visited our solar system 50,000 years ago and with no certain return in its future. C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was the 3rd comet discovered in the first half of March of 2022, thus given the designation E3 (with each month being divided in half, with January 1-15 listed as A, 16-31 as B, and so on). At present, it is only visible in the early morning hours in the midwest, rising a little earlier each night.
Capturing this image was challenging in part because of the miserable weather and constant cloud cover that has been our weather pattern for weeks. Astrospheric predicted a narrow window of a few hours on the night of January 14 into 15, and imaging started @ 3:20 am. I am never sure what duration of sub to shoot with comets, but since I had a LP filter in place, 180 seconds was the choice to capture more light. Given another opportunity I will ditch the filter and probably shoot at 120 seconds with a 60 or 120 second pause between subs. In addition, the mistakes were made with the framing decisions, thus I didn't capture much of the fantastically long tail; next time I will rotate the long edge of the framing parallel to the tail and try and place the comet head more in the bottom right quadrant to allow for the regression of the comet against the faster moving night sky.

Original
Final
B

B

Title: Using New Comet Alignment Tool, better

Description: Though I have a lot more to learn using the new Comet Alignment tool put out today, this first effort subtracting out Stars Aligned as the Operand resulted in a cleaner stacked comet and for sure a better signal in the comet tail. Thanks for the process upgrade!

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7014045
PixInsight job	W62GJ9ZHGV89D0H67MZWA29PM6TALOQL
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	15h45m11s.88
RA (top/left)	15h41m26s.15
RA (top/right)	15h41m19s.51
RA (bottom/right)	15h48m50s.33
RA (bottom/left)	15h49m11s.86

Dec (center)	+41°35′17″.3
Dec (top/left)	+42°37′07″.1
Dec (top/right)	+40°34′58″.9
Dec (bottom/right)	+40°33′09″.5
Dec (bottom/left)	+42°35′12″.0

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