Comet C/2023 P1 Nishimura on September 8, 2023

Comet C/2023 P1 Nishimura with Airplane Photobomber on September 8, 2023

For the past two weekends, we’ve gotten up at 3:30 AM to drive to a spot with a long view to the East to go comet hunting.  I had setup issues with my tracking mount both times – the GoTo tracking did not want to three star align.  On both days, I managed to overcome that obstacle in time to capture some images of the comet.  On September 8, the time frame between when the comet cleared the haze on the horizon and the time that the sky got bright pre-dawn was surprisingly short (about 20 minutes).  Also on September 8, I had a funny picture where an airplane had photobombed my comet image and flew right in front of the comet.  

Astrophotography is really two hobbies: capturing the images and processing them.

And I still haven’t mastered processing comets.  

But thanks to the excellent videos from Adam Block and a software update on Russ Croman’s extremely useful StarXterminator program (where my Comet Nishimura data from September 2 appears in the release notes), I have finally managed to produce some decent comet pictures.  I registered all the images with the one with the airplane photobomb so I could combine the final comet image with the airplane lights to make a photobomb picture.

It’s fun to find surprises in the night sky!

Camera geek info:

• Canon EOS 60D in manual mode, 30 second exposures, ISO 800 for 4 frames, ISO 400 for the remainder
• Williams Optics Zenith Star 73 III APO telescope
• Williams Optics Flat 73A
• SkyTech 2” LPRO-MAX CCD Filter
• iOptron CEM40
• Bacliff, Texas Bortle 6 suburban skies

Frames:

• 38 30 second lights, 24 used for stars
• 31 0.02 second flats
• 30 0.02 second flat darks
• 34 30 second darks

Processing geek info:

• PixInsight
• NoiseXterminator
• StarXTerminator
• Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch