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This morning
was completely clear, a day after a very cloud filled Saturday.
I was up at 4am and set out to image at least one comet, Comet
Lovejoy - now making its leisurely pace across Hercules and very
low on the eastern horizon an hour before morning twilight. Up
till now, it has been below the wall of the observatory in Payson,
and with the LQ moon now getting out of the way we can image
comets again. This was the first opportunity to capture this
comet again in the 12.5" f/5 astrograph!
Between 5am and
6am I was able to get both L channel and RGB data on this 7th
magnitude object. After 6 I was finished and thought that comet
Linear X1 now around 9th magnitude which was less than 10 degrees
away would be possible in the start of the morning twilight.
The digital circles on the mount were not behaving well, and
I kept getting the field next to the comet, with no comet in
sight. Finally at 6:25 I got on the comet but the autoguider
would not track on such a bright blue sky. So I managed a single
guided 60 second shot before the guider failed tracking. Not
a very deep shot, but its not too bad considering!
All shots are with
the water cooled ST10xme CCD at -20C and AstroDon filters. The
field here is just under half a degree...
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Lens: 12.5" f/5 Home bult Newtonian
Platform: Astrophysics AP1200
Exposure: 16m L, 6m RGB and 1m L for Linear
Location: Payson, Arizona
Elevation: 5150 ft.
Sky: Seeing 7/10, Transparency 8/10
Outside Temperature: 30F
Processing Tools: Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
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