The Good News:
Comet C/2008 P1 is the only comet in the sky right now with a nice long tail. I imaged it last night with a 4-arc minute long beautiful tail. Unlike C/2006 W3 which everyone is currently imaging and is just a round ball of luminosity, P1 has a real tail and looks like a real comet.
The Bad News:
Whereas tail-less W3 is a healthy magnitude 8.3, P1 is a dim little mag 15.4. Combine that with the skyglow from Chicago about 40 miles east giving me a NELM of about mag 3.5, and you have a real imaging challenge. But I did it!!!!!!!!
I used a Takahashi E-160 astrograph which is a fast f/3.3 and a Starlight Xpress SXV-H9 camera binned 2x2. I could only image for 3 minutes before I ran into sky glow saturation (mine is not a dark site). I only took four exposures, because when I looked at the raws in the observatory monitor I couldn’t see the comet. It was only later in the house when I processed the images in ImagesPlus that I saw I had captured it. Darn. I wish I had taken more frames now.
Anyway, images of this dim little fellow with a tail and accompanying documentation are at http://home.att.net/~dpersyk/new.htm I hope you’ll check it out.
Clear skies,
Dennis Persyk
Igloo (Now Roll-Off) Observatory Home Page http://dpersyk.home.att.net
Hampshire, IL
Comet C/2008 P1 is the only comet in the sky right now with a nice long tail. I imaged it last night with a 4-arc minute long beautiful tail. Unlike C/2006 W3 which everyone is currently imaging and is just a round ball of luminosity, P1 has a real tail and looks like a real comet.
The Bad News:
Whereas tail-less W3 is a healthy magnitude 8.3, P1 is a dim little mag 15.4. Combine that with the skyglow from Chicago about 40 miles east giving me a NELM of about mag 3.5, and you have a real imaging challenge. But I did it!!!!!!!!
I used a Takahashi E-160 astrograph which is a fast f/3.3 and a Starlight Xpress SXV-H9 camera binned 2x2. I could only image for 3 minutes before I ran into sky glow saturation (mine is not a dark site). I only took four exposures, because when I looked at the raws in the observatory monitor I couldn’t see the comet. It was only later in the house when I processed the images in ImagesPlus that I saw I had captured it. Darn. I wish I had taken more frames now.
Anyway, images of this dim little fellow with a tail and accompanying documentation are at http://home.att.net/~dpersyk/new.htm I hope you’ll check it out.
Clear skies,
Dennis Persyk
Igloo (Now Roll-Off) Observatory Home Page http://dpersyk.home.att.net
Hampshire, IL
