Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) - Animation of 4 hours of movement across the sky (Morsing)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Ursa Minor (UMi) · Contains: Solar system body or event

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Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) - Animation of 4 hours of movement across the sky

Revision title: Colour version

Powered byPixInsight

Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) - Animation of 4 hours of movement across the sky

Revision title: Colour version

Phew, this one was tough to edit! Of course using 60s frames for the animation presents it's own challenges in terms of Signal to Noise Ratio, but trying to handle more than 200 individual frames was a challenge! I leaned about the use of both Image Containers and and Process Containers in Pixinsight. Even downsampled, the GIF is huge, I hope it still works for everyone!

As I was not happy with just an autostretch and export via Blink, I had to set up a process that could handle the image processing consistently between the 200+ frames. I did the following: WBPP preprocessing as normal, NoiseXTerminator, Downsample, Crop, ABE, Background Neutralization, Histogram Transformation, Export as png's via Blink. However, I had not managed to get a consistent enough blackpoint from frame to frame, so I loaded all the png's into Photoshop and adjusted the blackpoint manually with levels (guided by the color sampling tool) on all frames. I noticed quite a bit of jittering in the animation at this point and had to re-align the images in Pixinsight. I then did a final NoiseXterminator pass, export via Blink, Load into photoshop and export as GIF.

In the end, I did not quite get to the quality I had hoped, but at least I got a full colour animation of the comet moving, representing around 4 hours of movement across the sky - and I have not seen many colour animations like this. Each frame is 60s and the comet moved around 0.16' in that time, or around 8.6 pixels. That is more than 2000 pixels over the 4 hours covered in the animation!

See also a more aggressively stretched, but more noisy, grayscale version in the original revision, which shows more details in the tail.

Hope you enjoy!

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Title: Colour version

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7121344
PixInsight job	JDH5D5KWZF1K7KSWG3W9SQECXK9ABVYG
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	14h29m06s.49
RA (top/left)	14h18m32s.29
RA (top/right)	14h27m33s.94
RA (bottom/right)	14h39m18s.20
RA (bottom/left)	14h30m48s.20

Dec (center)	+70°17′11″.6
Dec (top/left)	+70°38′01″.6
Dec (top/right)	+69°20′54″.3
Dec (bottom/right)	+69°54′11″.5
Dec (bottom/left)	+71°13′40″.6

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Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) - Animation of 4 hours of movement across the sky

Revision title: Colour version

Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) - Animation of 4 hours of movement across the sky

Revision title: Colour version

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Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) - Animation of 4 hours of movement across the sky

Revision title: Colour version

Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) - Animation of 4 hours of movement across the sky

Revision title: Colour version

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