October | 2024 | Space&Aliens

I have a bunch of wide field comet images from Dell City, Texas and Pearland, Texas that are proving … challenging … to process, given that they were taken near dusk with a DSLR on a tripod. Everything is changing – the Earth is rotating (so the stars are moving relative to the camera on a non-tracking tripod), the comet is moving relative to the stars, and the sky brightness is changing.

But now Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan Atlas is getting higher in the night sky, so it is no longer visible only at dusk. So I could set up my tracking mount and telescope to image it. The tail is still really long – much longer than I can capture in the field of view of my telescope!

Even with a tracking mount and dark sky, processing a comet moving relative to the stars is still really challenging, and I really benefited from following the “Standard Comet” example in Adam Block’s Comet Academy.

Camera geek info:

Williams Optics Zenith Star 73 III APO telescope
Williams Optics Flat 73A
ZWO 2” Electronic Filter Wheel
Antila RGB filters
ZWO ASI183MM-Pro-Mono camera
ZWO ASiair Plus
iOptron CEM40
Friendswood, Texas Bortle 7-8 dark skies

Frames:

October 24, 2024
- Interleaved LRGB lights
  - 11 60 second Gain 150 R lights
- - 10 60 second Gain 150 G lights
- - 10 60 second Gain 150 B lights
- 30 0.05 second R flats
- 30 0.02 second B and G flats
- 30 0.05 second darks
- 30 0.02 second darks
- 30 60 second darks

Processing geek info:

PixInsight
BlurXterminator
NoiseXterminator
StarXTerminator
ImageBlend

Earlier this month, we were very lucky and happened to be at my favorite dark sky site – Dell City, Texas – when I got an alert on my phone that we might have a Kp8 geomagnetic storm coming the next day, with a chance to see the Northern Lights much lower than usual.

I have the app on my phone because we’ve traveled to places where seeing the Northern Lights was possible. We even saw them on the horizon from Inverness, Scotland. We’ve also been on two trips where Northern Lights tours were on the agenda – but both tours were cancelled due to weather. Earlier this year, when there was another big geomagnetic storm, we went north to Conroe, Texas where people reported seeing the lights. I found a great foreground – but alas, no lights.

So imagine my delight when I was setting up my telescope in Dell City, Texas, where the skies are very familiar to me, and I looked up and saw moving red lights to the north. Red lights to the north are not normal. The Northern Lights were visible from Texas! I literally sprinted into our Air B&B to get my husband and my camera.