Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Draco (Dra)  ·  Contains:  HD137588  ·  HD137928  ·  HD138338  ·  HD138554  ·  HD234225
C/2022 E3 (ZTF) at Ursa Major (Processing Workflow in Description), Olly Barrett
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C/2022 E3 (ZTF) at Ursa Major (Processing Workflow in Description)

C/2022 E3 (ZTF) at Ursa Major (Processing Workflow in Description), Olly Barrett
Powered byPixInsight

C/2022 E3 (ZTF) at Ursa Major (Processing Workflow in Description)

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

The Target:
The green comet named C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was only discovered inside of the orbit of Jupiter on 2 March 2022, spotted from the Zwicky Transient Facility in California using the 1.2-m, f/2.4 Schmidt telescope at Mount Palomar, hence the 2/2022 E3 (ZTF)... The green glow is a result of UV radiation from the sun lighting up the gases that are streaming off the comet's surface.
C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is thought to have come from the Oort Cloud, a region around the outer solar system that is thought to contain billions of comets that are mostly in a stable orbit around the Sun.
It's 50,000 years since this celestial object last graced the night skies of Earth, actually during the Stone Age!
At it's closest point it will be just 28,000,000 miles away from our planet and on the 1st and 2nd of February it should be visible with the naked eye; when this gorgeous comet gets closest to Earth, it will be in the Camelopardalis constellation... It is currently heading north, gaining speed as it pushes up past the handle of the Big Dipper en-route to its month’s end fly-by of Polaris, the Pole Star. NASA has described the comet's rare fly-by as an "awesome opportunity to make a personal connection with an icy visitor from the distant outer solar system"

The Image:
This is only the 2nd Comet I've imaged... the first was Comet Leonard and I only got a handful of RGB subs with the target low on the horizon so it wasn't that detailed after editing...
When this target appeared over my house on a clear, Moonless night I couldn't believe my luck.. this time I was able to plan the capture and come at the processing with an extra year of experience...
My aim was to do as little colour processing as possible so I could produce, pretty much,  a true-colour image of the comet...
I shot Luminace at 180s (to bring out the gas trails) and RGB at 30s to keep the nucleus and surrounding area 'tight'

Processing:
I tried several tutorials on YouTube with disappointing results and in the end came up with my own system...
I'm sure this has been done before by many astrophotographers but here is my Pixinsight/Photoshop workflow...

Stack and register subframes in WBPP

Isolate Stars:
Process as normal, use StarXTerminator and combine to give RGB starfield.

Isolate Comet:
Using Comet Alignment Module align all LRGB subframes to Comet
Use StarXTerminator Batch Processing on each of the 4 comet aligned filter channels (in this case 3 x 10 on RGB and 1 x 10 on Luminance)
This takes a while to do 40 star exterminations but you can kick back, have a cup or two of coffee, sleep, fidget or whatever until it is completed.

Now you have 10 x Starless subframes (comet aligned) for each filter and you haven't had to get rid of star streaks as each individual frame has had stars removed before integrating
Run each starless filter group separately through ImageIntegration without normalising or pixel adjusting, just straight integration...
You now have separate Linear RGB stacks with no Stars and a perfect comet...
Combine to make LRGB image or combine RGB and add Luminance later. Regarding stretching, noise reduction, masking etc, etc…. it’s just your favourite RGB workflow at this point. 
Then pop the stars from the previous process back when you are ready!

I did literally NO COLOUR ADJUSTMENTS in my processing of C/2022 E3 (ZTF) what you see in the image is how it arrived at the camera sensor, personally I think it's spectacular in it's raw form, a truly magnificent and mind-blowing spectacle of nature...

Hope you found that all useful and, of course...

Clear Skies!
Olly

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C/2022 E3 (ZTF) at Ursa Major (Processing Workflow in Description), Olly Barrett