In processing this and looking back at the information of this comet on the night, I realise how lucky I was. I was finishing off in early Sunday morning and thought I'd grab a little bit of the Coathanger to see how it will frame for later in the year. Looking at the subs I could see something standing out and cycling through, saw it moving - a quick check of Sky Safari showed it was C/2021 S3 (PANSTARRS) gate crashing the party
This was challenging to bring together due to the packed starfield but I think I've got something worth enjoying. The comet could have a bit more green in it, but it started to look a little artificial to my eye... but I've perhaps been too conservative.
The final image is a combination of two:
- stars extracted from a regular integration.
- subs calibrated, debayered and gradient corrected, then stars bulk extracted with StarX (utilising a small mask for the comet nucleus). These starless images were then CometAligned in PixInsight and then ImageIntegrated.
After this combination, it was a case of trying to work with what I had! The comet only image was very messy but some brute force and a few compromises later, it seemed to be coming together.
A fortuitous event this time, but I hope to revisit Collinder 399 again properly later in the year with the Epsilon
Thanks for looking!
Captured with NINA, pre-processed in APP and processed in PixInsight.
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