Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Boötes (Boo)  ·  Contains:  Solar system body or event
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Tracking Comet C/2020 T2 (Palomar) past the M3 globular cluster, Doug Gray
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Tracking Comet C/2020 T2 (Palomar) past the M3 globular cluster

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Tracking Comet C/2020 T2 (Palomar) past the M3 globular cluster, Doug Gray
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Tracking Comet C/2020 T2 (Palomar) past the M3 globular cluster

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Description

C/2020 T2 just happened to be passing near M3 when I decided to explore the comets section in the ASIAIR navigation screen. One thing led to another and I ended up spending an hour browsing all the comet tracking sites. I didn't realize how many were visible to amateur astronomers!

This is my first time trying to post-process a comet (except for some quick edits of NEOWISE before really getting into this hobby). Wow, is this a lot of work. I did not realize how quickly solar system objects could move in a single session. I tried to simplify things by keeping my exposure time each night short (10 30" exposures per channel) so I would not need to use the comet/astroid mode in Siril, but I still ended up with chromatic aberration as the comet moves a detectable amount even in that short a time between filter changes. I thought mono cameras were superior for most astro use cases, but it seems to not be the case for fast moving objects. The other learning was that a meridian flip in the middle of a session will also make post-processing a nightmare. I had actually shot data in L as well as RGB and on 3 other nights as well, but clouds, experimentation with exposure time, and meridian flips made it much easier to limit this project to just 4 days.

Not exactly a wow image, but it was a fun exercise and good practice for the next big comet to show up.

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Tracking Comet C/2020 T2 (Palomar) past the M3 globular cluster, Doug Gray