Astroblog: Comet 49P amongst the Galaxies

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Comet 49P amongst the Galaxies

Comet 49P taken with the iTelescope T14 instrument in Mayhill New Mexico. I took 10 x 120 second image. Top Left: Images images stacked on the stars using ImageJ, and the stack Summed using Z project. After that I did a square root process to clean up the background a bit, then cropped down to make the comet (bottom left of centre) easier to see. Top Right: As above but entire field. Bottom Left: Galaxies identified by Astrometry.net . Click on any image to embiggen.

Comet 49P is currently in a field very rich in some iconic galaxies, sadly, the waxing Moon is not far away either. Here I've used the widefield T14 instrument to get a good feel for the spectacular field the comet is in. The comet is a faintish magnitude 14, and moves sufficiently that it doesn't stack, and is smeared out and faint. Still if you embiggen the top left image it looks pretty nice.

I probably have to wait until the 19th for the Moon to wane sufficiently to get any more images of this comet.

Labels: astrophotography, comet, comets