Comet Lovejoy

Comet Lovejoy

Taken on 16 January at the ASNSW dark sky site, 150km NW of Sydney, lovejoy was a marginal naked eye fuzzy patch and in binoculars only showed the coma around the nucleus, the tail was quite faint.  It was discovered by Australian Amateur Terry Lovejoy last year.

This is a stacked image consisting of 46 frames at 20 sec at ISO1600 and 3200, the camera was mounted on an Ipotron camera tracker.  Alignment was not great but enabled 20 sec exposures, none of which showed any tail out of camera.

Frames were stacked in deep sky stacker software and incorporated dark, bias frames and flats to remove vignetting.  32 bit image saved and imported into PS for levels adjustment then to 16 bit to complete processing.  Star mask used to do BG noise reduction.

Larger image:  Lovejoy

Canon 1DMkIV + 180mm macro.  20 sec @ f3.5 ISO1600/3200