Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Ursa Minor (UMi)  ·  Contains:  Solar system body or event
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Comet C/2022 e3 (ZTF), Chris Gnam
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Comet C/2022 e3 (ZTF)

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Comet C/2022 e3 (ZTF), Chris Gnam
Powered byPixInsight

Comet C/2022 e3 (ZTF)

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

This was my first time trying to image and process a comet.  I definitely learned a lot and am reasonably happy with the result!  This is a composite of 2 images:  One where I aligned and stacked on the comet, and one where I aligned and stacked on the stars.  I found that I got better results by stacking the comet in batches of every 5th image as it allowed me to better reject the stars since they weren't overlapping.

Processing Details:
PixInsight:
  • WeightedBatchPreprocessing (Calibration, Registration, and Stacking on the stars)
  • CometAlignment + ImageIntegration (Aligning and stacking on comet)
  • AutomaticBackgroundExtractor
  • DynamicBackgroundExtractor
  • ScreenTransferFunction + HistogramTransformation (Stretching)
  • StarMask to combine star stacked image with comet stacked image
  • PixelMath to combine the background stars with the comet image
  • CurvesTransformation (some minor tweaks to the colors and further stretching)


LightRoom:
  • Increase in vibrance/saturation
  • Boost contrast
  • Noise reduction and Color Noise reduction (to clean up residual star streaks)
  • Slightly bumped Dehaze

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

Comet C/2022 e3 (ZTF), Chris Gnam