Last look at Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)

Taken with the M200 and the $99 (special sale !) 55-250 mm lens.

I'm using a portable tracker - I've marked the position to place the tripod legs on the flagstone path, and I do no other alignment - after aligning on the first day about 2 weeks ago. This is about 17 minutes of light (78 exposures of 13 sec, f/5.6 ISO 800 at a FL of 200mm. It's very convenient to locate and center the comet at 55mm and then zoom to something more suitable.

There were clouds scudding by, and I shot in periods of clear sky.

Since this tracker uses a ball head, light gear like the M200 and this lens is much more practical  than a heavy DSLR and a heavy lens when the object of interest is almost directly overhead.

Stacked in DeepSkyStacker, with a lot of post done manually since DSS had problems combining the stack with stars aligned with the stack having the comet aligned.

The extended tail was very dim, so I left the black point fairly high.

Comet and Mars

David

Nicely done!

Really great how much you were able to squeeze out of that combo.

And it seems you are not only a good comet hunter, but also a good bargain hunter 

Nice job, and good result.

The M200 and 55-250 is a good enough combo for the comet on a tracker, if you have enough exposure, and you're in the right ballpark to start. Of course more is better and should bring out more detail, but you got the nice green coma and then some.

I wanted to get out and shoot this, but it hasn't been clear this week where I am in Florida.

I only recently figured out that DeepSkyStacker has that comet mode and you can opt to center the comet in the image and let the stars 'trail' - that's what I've done so far.

I tried the more complicated mode where it can try to align both the comet and the stars separately, but it didn't work well for me - leaving many faint star trail artifacts. Someone pointed out to me that folks use other software for part of the process.... when I have some time I may try other methods to see if I can stack again and get both the stars and the comet sharp. I hope that will reveal more detail in the tail(s).

Larry Rexley wrote:

Nice job, and good result.

The M200 and 55-250 is a good enough combo for the comet on a tracker, if you have enough exposure, and you're in the right ballpark to start. Of course more is better and should bring out more detail, but you got the nice green coma and then some.

I wanted to get out and shoot this, but it hasn't been clear this week where I am in Florida.

I only recently figured out that DeepSkyStacker has that comet mode and you can opt to center the comet in the image and let the stars 'trail' - that's what I've done so far.

I tried the more complicated mode where it can try to align both the comet and the stars separately, but it didn't work well for me - leaving many faint star trail artifacts. Someone pointed out to me that folks use other software for part of the process.... when I have some time I may try other methods to see if I can stack again and get both the stars and the comet sharp. I hope that will reveal more detail in the tail(s).

That was what I got, too.

So I snipped out a small bit of the 'align comet' result that held the comet, and pasted it into the 'align stars' image. The I manually erased the dozen or so trailed stars in the 'align on comet' patch.

I tried that same procedure for the images I took on the 7th, but there were way too many stars in the small comet bit - maybe 40, and some crossed the coma and couldn't be seamlessly removed.

I also tried Affinity Photo, but I must have done something stupid because after loading the 78 image files, it worked on them for about a minute and then crashed.

David