From Wikipedia:
C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is a
long periodcomet from the
Oort cloud that was discovered by the
Zwicky Transient Facility on 2 March 2022. The comet has a bright green glow around its nucleus which is due to the effect of sunlight on its molecules, especially
diatomic carbon and
cyanogen.
I was so excited to see another interesting comet that I finally pulled the trigger on a new OSC camera. This is first light on my new ASI 2600MC Pro. I captured darks and flats, but have not adjusted the tilt plate yet, so I've got some odd stars in the corners of the frame. I notice others have been using 1-2 minute subs, but I could clearly see motion blur in the core with those exposure times so I stuck with 30 seconds. This is a stack of 300 frames aligned to the comets movement (with a smaller value of sigma to remove the stars as outliers), over a stack 240 of the best frames aligned on the stars (by fwhm). The star stack had a bit of a smudge from the comet core, but StarNet++ help remove that so I could composite them.
I tried to do this with my mono camera once, and vowed never again. Much easier with the 2600MC, but the filesize after debayering was a bit much. Will have to explore bin2 in the future.
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