Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was discovered by astronomers using the wide-field survey camera at the Zwicky Transient Facility r in early March 2022. Since then the new long-period comet has brightened substantially and is now sweeping across the northern constellation Corona Borealis in predawn skies. It's still too dim to see without a telescope though.... On a voyage through the inner Solar System comet 2022 E3 will be at perihelion, its closest to the Sun, in the new year on January 12 and at perigee, its closest to our fair planet, on February 1. The brightness of comets is notoriously unpredictable, but by then C/2022 E3 (ZTF) could become only just visible to the eye in dark night skies.
https://science.nasa.gov/comet-2022-e3-ztfC/2022 E3 (ZTF) is a
long period comet that was discovered by the
Zwicky Transient Facility (hence the catchy name 'ZTF') on 2 March 2022, using the 1.2-m, f/2.4 Schmidt telescope at Mount =skimlinks-unlinkedPalomar. When it was discovered it was just a tiny, 17th magnitude smudge in
Aquila, five times further from the Sun than Earth.
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/advice/comet-c-2022-e3-ztf/----------------------------------------------------------
This was a surprise project. Maurizio couldn't stand it and he went to hunt this comet at dawn on Three Kings Day, January 6th. He went to a mountain close to Como Lake, with bortle 4 and freezzz!.
He ran into some problems since he had to use the first mount that he had not used for more than two years and whose payload is at the limit of 200-800 Newton. He found it quite difficult to make it work, either because the programs did not recognize it or because the cables did not make good contact and when everything started to work, the triangulation sometimes failed on centered stars but not to a new coordinate.
Maurizio had to catch the comet almost manually but finally the mount after several attempts ended up responding and he was able to do the last sessions without problems. The other problem is that there was a full moon and despite using the L-Pro filter, the exposures could not be more than 20 sec as they burned.
He did four sessions that totaled around 640 frames but I decided to process the last session composed of 305 frames that started from 4:06 am and ended at 6:58 am.
With DSS I made a first stack to obtain the base of stars after subtracting the comet in Ps, and then a stack only of the comet (startrail) that I tried to clean in the best way.
In PS I apply arcsinh curve, curve S, clarity, white and some saturation, NoiseXterminator and Denoise AI. Then a final blending of the stars base and the comet alone was made.
It was fascinating to observe from the first moment the very fine tail left behind by the comet as well as that extraordinary elongated crown fan and the faint bluish coloration towards the ends.
We are quite pleased with the results, we hope you like it.
Have a good start to the Year 2023 and we appreciate your visit.
Process January 2023
Dedicado a Nohemi, vuela con ella.
https://twitter.com/AstroOtus/status/1612899036280791042 
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