It started off innocently enough, can I photograph that comet they have been talking about?
What I hope is the final image that I will be happy with……
The process to getting here was a bit more complex than I planned, and definitely became a bit of an obsession. Not much text in this blog, but just the progression of the images.
First effort, realistically I was just happy to find it and getting any image at all.
Just in case you wondered, this image is is roughly at the normal angle of view with the comet circled in red, this is also from a much darker nearby location than all my other images which were battling the light pollution in my backyard. Really, it is not that easy to find and see with the naked eye
After seeing other efforts on the web, went back to it a few days later determined to get someone a bit more comet like. Got serious in using my star tracker.
Next it was getting more images to stack and learn how to post process, happy to see structure beginning to appear in the tail.
Decided to get more serious about this and brought out my new goto tracking mount, nice thing about this is that being computer controlled I did not have to work as hard to just find the comet :-) Also let me use my bigger 400mm lens
Was starting to get excited as I began to see real structure in the tail, but was still sure I could get more. Time to try some different processing software and a very steep learning curve.
This is probably my favourite version of my efforts, very similar effort to the previous image but after learning a huge amount about processing these kinds of images. This is the image that is printed and hanging on the wall. But I wanted to capture more of that amazing tail.
So close, but I thought I could do better if I could get my understanding of how to do calibration frame done properly.
The final effort, I hope. This image is composed not only of 30 normal images stacked, but actually a further 90 calibration images to remove all the noise generated by the temperature, the sensor and the lens. It is not a perfect astro image and is nothing compared to many out on the web, but I’m pretty happy.