I really tried hard to find the comet that appears every 80,000 years or so ... it's name veritably rolling off the tongue ... C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) -- which I am taking from Stellarium, a superb application that everyone should have on their phone. Stellarium even shows the location of the Starlink satellites in real time, which is a bit of a hoot.
Anyway, so last Wednesday I tried to find the comet and it was a dismal failure. No matter how I tried locating it, I just could not get it. And then my battery ran out on the G9. Grrr. Further comedy ensued when I went home and decided to give the Nikon D7200 a try as an optical viewfinder has a better chance of showing the comet under magnification. And after a frustrating search for the battery chargers (5 flat batteries!) I gave up as they must have gone into storage during our ongoing basement disaster.
So ... I charged several G9 batteries instead and gave it another try Thursday evening. I got the compass in the phone squared away and using Stellarium I was pretty sure I was in the right area, but I was only a bit out of the city and so had to contend with some lights and glow.
After a short stint of randomly shooting to see if I had found it, I decided to use my brain and shoot each part of the sky at moderate magnification (200mm equivalent). I had brought my precision mount on the tripod, so all I needed to do was to search methodically until I saw the comet in an image. Easy peasy, right?
Well, actually, it was :-) ... I found the comet after less than 10 shots. And I was completely blown away as the head and tail were crystal clear. I plan to try to stack the images I shot, but this is just one image processed lightly and cropped. It is noisy and the contrast is not great, but the comet is clearly visible and that is cool to me.
C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS)
Panasonic G9, Pana-Leica 100-400 (gen1), 400mm, f/6.3, 2s, ISO 3200, RAW
Ok, that's not great ... but I am hoping that stacking the images will do better. We'll see.
So that was fun, and last night I got the itch to shoot Jupiter as it was just hanging there in the sky. I went out back onto the deck and sat down for a fun session.
Unfortunately, I dislike all the images I got (the moons are clearly visible, but the exposure sucks), so I shot the moon as well and was very pleased with how that turned out.
I used Luminar Neo, the editor I purchased to free myself from the Adobe subscription (>300 per year, every year) and am learning how to process a little better every day.
Moon (duh)
Panasonic G9, Pana-Leica 100-400 (gen1), 400mm, f/7.1, 1/800s, ISO 200, RAW
I was surprised at how clean and sharp the image is and how well I was able to bring out the inherent color of the various lunar maria (which are defined as: large, dark, basaltic plains on Earth's Moon, formed by lava flowing into ancient impact basins). It is a beautiful object to shoot and process, that is certain.
Now to try again to get something useful from shooting Jupiter. The real astrophotographers out there are getting images these days that look as good as or better than my moon shot above ... but that takes a serious investment in time and money and I admit to having insufficient patience. Alas, I did find it rewarding to capture the comet and I will try to make time to get a cleaner image of it by stacking. If I achieve that, I will post here on the blog.
I just unpublished this because I forgot to add this cool image of a Starlink going by ...
Note that the exposure here was too long and so the satellite is smeared across a lot of sky, but I was able to go into Stellarium to confirm that this really is a Starlink ... as shown below.
I think that's pretty cool :-)
