The AM Forum

See this link

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/observing-news/binocular-comet-lovejoy-heading-c2014-q2-lovejoy-1211142/

For those of us who are also skywatchers as well as hams (seems to be a very common thing).

Need to take out my 8" and snap a few pix when the Moon gets past full.

FEELEEP

Latest reports from my friends indicated around Mag 4.5. Easily visible at a dark sky site. Link to Sky and Telescope below:

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/observing-news/spot-comet-lovejoy-tonight-122920141/

Comet Lovejoy 8 Jan 2015, 10:45 PM, Richmond Hill, Canon T2i Rebel, 12800 ASA, 300mm zoom telephoto. You can just see the ion tail trailing off at the 10 o'clock position.

Socked in, full cloud cover here. Maybe tomorrow night.

Its so good I'm gonna have to take out my big 8".

Is this the one that is going to hit and wipe us all out?

Hate to disappoint, but this is NOT the one that leads to an extinction level event......

Comet Lovejoy, Q2/2014, Richmond Hill, GA. 10 PM Eastern. Vixen 8" F/4, GPDX Mount, Skysensor 2000, Canon T2i, Prime Focus. Photo taken from my driveway. Lots of technical issues; mostly self-inflicted. Exposure about 20 seconds, 3200 ASA.

Nice shot!

Great viewing of Mercury and Venus last night just past sunset. It was very clear here and both were very bright. Venus was so bright it could've been mistaken for airplane, except that it wasn't moving!  ;)

Very nice. Both the dust and ion tails show up.
Looks like you really pushed that exposure.

Looks similar to Valiant tank circuit parts flaming thru the air.....

Here is the result after combining frames with Deep Sky Stacker.

Well skies finally cleared enough here to see it.
Found easily with 7x35's just where S.& T. map said it would be.
Just off the Pleiades tonight perpendicular to a line between them and the Hyades.
Faint smudge with naked eye, no tail apparent in binoc's from my not so
dark adapted eyes.  Thankfully It's high in the evening sky now.

Not your major comet so if you miss it you're not missing much, but I'm happy to count it among my popular comets seen.

Tonights photo...stack of 10 - 1 minute exposures, 300mm, Canon T2i, 3200 ASA.

Philip

P.
Nice, framed by a local asterism.
did you use any type of filter?
Using Registax software?
-Rick

I looked a couple of nights ago for the first time at 9 p.m. when it was clear after consulting the S & T website and digging out my old star finder wheel.  I used my 7 X 50's (good quality) and with them I could make out a fuzzy ball.  It wasn't too visible I would say and seemed to be varying in brightness, perhaps a physiological effect.  It was almost at the zenith.

So anyhow I saw it.  I would say from that one observation I was somewhat disappointed.

No, using Deep Sky Stacker. No filter...I think the purplish cast is chromatic aberration from the econo-telephoto. The camera autorotated all my raw frames (Bad news) so I had issues stacking my 10 light and 10 dark frames. I just converted the 10 lights to JPGs and forgot about the darks. I don't know if I can work around that. Live and learn. Each frame 1 min, 3200 ASA, about f/4.5 on the telephoto at 100mm, Vixen GPDX with Skysensor 2KPC. I used the small telescope and piggybacked the camera on it (3" f/5 refractor with Jaegers objective).

Tom, we get comets that break the Mag 6 naked eye threshold so infrequently that any of these is a treat; now mag 3.8. I've only seen two, Hyakataki and Hale Bopp, that were the walk outside, look up, and say WOW COMET type. Halley was bust as we were on the opposite side of the solar system when it passed.

Of course, those of us that think like this are just as rabid about it as AM.

You stacked Jpegs?

It's interesting thing think that the tail is something like 3 million miles long!

Not by choice. My camera autorotate image function was on and DSS was spitting out garbage. So, I was forced to convert all to JPG and then stack. I shot RAWs and dark frames.....Someone suggested convert to TIFF and it should work better.

All in all, a very nice photograph, Phil.

The comet tail is very evident.  Stacking is the way to go.

I especially like studying the star patterns. Totally random view from Earth, still, interesting.  The Milky Way has several arms. To put it in perspective, in that photograph, we are seeing the brighter and nearby stars facing into deep space, opposite from the galactic core, in our own spiral arm of which the sun is a member. (towards Orion)    In the summer towards Sagittarius, the next layer, the faint mist/ fog of stars is in the next arm towards the galactic core.

IE, the brighter individual stars seen with the naked eye reside in our own arm. The faint, mist of stars are in other arms of the galaxy and cannot be resolved as individual stars with the naked eye and create the "milky" effect.

T

Yes TIFF would be better. JPEG is a destructive or lossy type of compression. When stacking images, it increases the amount of noise. TIFF is lossless, so no extra noise is introduced.