Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) has an origin in the Oort cloud, which is on the order of 2000 to 100000 astronomical units away in our solar system (VERY far beyond pluto which is in the Kuiper belt). This comet is making it's first appearance into the inner solar system in 50,000 years. It reaches closest approach on February 1st of this year (2023). The green color in the core is due to sunlight off it's molecules (especially Cyanogen and diatomic carbon). In the image, the tail can be seen to be disconnected in places. This is normal evolution of the comet as particles escape from the nucleus.
This is my first comet image, and it was quite a journey. I expected this to go a whole lot easier than it did. First of all, a switch of cameras to a wider field didn't go as easily as expected. Then I had problems with the new PixInsight comet alignment tool. I struggled to figure out how best to "freeze" the motion of the tail. I wound up integrating a bunch of trial cases to find a balance between tail structure blur vs background noise. In the end, I didn't use the comet alignment tool at all. Instead, I fell back to traditional processing. This comet image was formed from 233 images of stars during the capture, but only 20 frames of comet so as to "freeze" the tail).
I've got 3.4 hours of good comet data, and movies of the dynamics can be found below. The first video is semi-processed with ABE, curves, TGVDenoise, & slight color saturation. The 2nd video is just raw frames auto-stretched.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hdcEUkUQ_Ahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toKZZJkix3M
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