Comet ZTF (C/2022 E3) as seen on the 23rd January 2023. Although the comet was pretty quiet around this point, some interesting features can be seen, including two ion tails and the 'anti-tail', caused by an optical illusion when the Earth passes through the comet's orbital plane.
This is my first attempt at comet imaging and I'm quite pleased with the result considering. Things to improve upon in the future included better framing to catch more of the ion tails and a larger FOV. I'm going to add a focal reducer to my FSQ-85, which will help achieve this.
In terms of how I processed this image, I captured a set of LRGB frames whilst tracking the comet and a set whilst tracking the stars (sidereal). I then removed the stars from the first set of data using StarXTerminator to just leave the comet. The Process Batch feature of StarXTerminator really helped with this. I then aligned and combined the comet only images to produce an LRGB composition, then carried out my normal LRGB processing steps. I then extracted the stars from the sidereal frames, then combined and processed them separately. I then aligned the star frames accurately with the comet only frames and blended them using the Screen blend mode in Photoshop. To retain the distant galaxies that can also be seen in the image, I also used the background from the sidereal frames and blended it with the final image.
The breakdown of the frames are shown below:
Comet only frames:
- L: 25 x 120s
- R: 10 x 120s
- G: 10 x 120s
- B: 10 x 120s
Star (sidereal) frames:
- L: 10 x 120s
- R: 10 x 120s
- G: 10 x 120s
- B: 10 x 120s
Hope this helps and that you like the result.
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