With a weather window of just half an hour I managed to take some short exposure images of comet C-2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) before the clouds once again spoiled the view.
I double mounted a 71mm William Optics doublet refractor and a Sony E10 Milc Vlogging camera fitted with a 70mm lens onto my CEM26 mount which I placed on some ground marks to roughly align the rig with the NCP. I shot 2, 5 and 20 s exposures unguided using both LRGB and SHO filters with the scope camera (a ZWO ASI 533MM Pro) and 15s exposures with the Sony Milc camera. Some haze and low cloud spoiled the narrowband images and due to a rain shower no calibration files were taken. The images were stacked in Affinity Photo/DSS and Pixinsight with processing done in Pixinsight and Adobe Photoshop 2024. Due to the comet's movement the nucleus was somewhat blurred using the conventional stacking method, so I processed a single image from the Milc camera to show the nucleus better. I also stacked the Milc camera images to give around 3 minutes total exposure which showed a faint forward facing anti tail. I used DSS to comet align those, as well as to try to better define the nucleus. The scope images were just stacked in the normal way and comprise around 7 minutes of LRGB and 5 minutes of SHO.
Click on an image to get a closer view
Comet-aligned stack
Single frame
Chris Bowden
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