{"id":370,"date":"2017-04-21T12:48:22","date_gmt":"2017-04-21T12:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.star-gazing.co.uk\/WebPage\/?p=370"},"modified":"2017-04-21T12:57:54","modified_gmt":"2017-04-21T12:57:54","slug":"challenging-comets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.star-gazing.co.uk\/WebPage\/challenging-comets\/","title":{"rendered":"Challenging Comets"},"content":{"rendered":"

We all love a challenge. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to capture the small solar system object 2014 JO 25 this week, due to circumstances and clouds. However, over the last few weeks I did have fun tracking down two challenging comets. I live on a housing estate, with not only lots of light pollution, but neighbouring houses as well. So my horizon in many directions, leaves a lot to be desired. Two comets in particular were my targets. Terry Lovejoy discovered another cracker. Entitled C\/2017 E4, I knew it was fairly low to the horizon. But on the morning of the 5th of April, I got up early at 4am to try and catch it.\u00a0Out into the dark(ish) garden I went and started to set everything up. Once all on track, with camera focussed, I slewed the teescope round to the position and then realised the comet was still just behind a house quite a way from the observatory and dawn was starting to break. The comet did soon reveal itself as a green smudge on my images, and I had enough time to capture some subs to make a useful final image\u00a0before the sky background started to overwhelm the comet.<\/p>\n

The coma of the comet appears very flattened to me.
\nBelow is the resulting image and a monochrome inverted version attempting to show some detail in the tail.
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As the sky brightened, I couldn’t help capturing a couple of images of Saturn which was up in the south.<\/p>\n

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A couple of mornings later (7th April) I got up early once more hoping to capture Comet\u00a0C\/2015 ER61 PANSTARRS. I got up at just before 4am thinking I would have at least an hour to capture a decent image… Unfortunately, I didn’t look up the circumstances properly beforehand (most unlike me). If you think Lovejoy was challenging, this raised the bar even further. When I got the camera set up and on the comets position, it was still only 3 degrees above the eastern horizon. So it was actually behind our fence (not to mention the neighbouring buildings). So it was a frustrating wait in the brightening dawn for it start to register on my images.<\/p>\n

Here’s the sequence of images I took from rising above the fence until the brightness of the sky forced me to finally give in.<\/p>\n

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