Comet 46P/Wirtanen 2018 Apparition (Justin Hendrickson)

Contains: Solar system body or event

Comet 46P/Wirtanen 2018 Apparition

From my observing notes dated December 16th, 2018:
Comet 46P/Wirtanen was discovered on Jan 17th, 1948 by Carl Wirtanen at the Lick Observatory near San Jose, CA. Its current orbital period is 5.5 years and during its current apparition made its closest approach to the Earth today. The comet is estimated to be about 0.75 miles in diameter and it came within 7.1 million miles, or 30 lunar distances, of Earth today, which is the 10th closest comet approach in modern times. There was not much of a visible tail on the comet, but it was fairly bright at magnitude 4-ish and could be seen with the naked eye at a dark sky location. I had a little trouble spotting it with binoculars from my light polluted suburban backyard last night. I'm glad I did get to observe and photograph it Saturday night, since it rained all night here tonight. I captured about an hour's worth of exposures before the clouds ended the evening, and in the time-lapse animation, you can really see how fast the comet moves compared to the background star field. A freeware program called Deep Sky Stacker was utilized to stack the 105 exposures of 30 seconds in length. In the image with the star trails, the images were registered on the comet's coma, and in the other image, they were stacked so that the background was still. This is my second time photographing a comet and my first go at stacking comet images and making an animation, so that was fun. Still have no fancy post processing software, not even Photoshop, so it's all still pretty rudimentary at this point.

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Status	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6584758
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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Comet 46P/Wirtanen 2018 Apparition

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