Our last visit to Dell City, Texas ended with a fun event: going comet hunting with new friends. 

I knew from comet hunting with my husband the previous evening that C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS would be visible in the early evening sky.  But this time, I wanted to image it over the Cornudas Mountains to the west of town.  I also wanted to have a view over the flat fields to the mountains and the sky above – which I could find by driving just a few blocks north of the center of town.

I invited some new local friends to join us, and they came in a pickup truck loaded with lawn chairs.  It was a comet tailgate party!

We had a great time visiting while we watched the sky as Venus appeared, followed by some bright stars, followed by the comet.  We could see it naked eye!  We could even see the comet’s tail naked eye!  It was pretty impressive.

It’s taken me over a month to learn how to and successfully process these pictures.  Each picture used one set of images for the comet, stars, sky, and foreground/mountains, but each part was processed separately.  The earlier pink picture where the comet is higher in the sky was made from 120 4 second shots (8 minutes of data).  The later orange picture where the comet is lower in the sky was made from 75 10 second shots (12.5 minutes of data).

One of the things I tried to do while processing was to make sure that all the fuzz around the comet and the anti-tail were real and not processing artifacts.  You can use the sliders below to compare the final images with the comet-only portion to see that, if anything, the final images show less fuzz than what was in the data.  (The comet-only data was calibrated, blur exterminated, star exterminated, comet-aligned, stacked, dynamic background extracted, and stretched.)

This event is high on my list of “coolest astro things I’ve seen.”  And I’m glad I had such a great group of folks to share it with.

What cool things have you shared with friends recently?

Camera geek info:

• Canon EOS 60D in manual mode, 4 second and 10 second exposures, ISO 800
• Canon EF 85 mm f/1.8 lens at f/8, manual focus at infinity
• Intervalometer
• Tripod
• Dell City, Texas Bortle 2-3 dark skies

Frames:

• October 13, 2024 
  • 120 4 second lights for pink image with higher comet
  • 75 10 second lights for orange image with lower comet
  • 30 0.01 second flats
  • 30 0.01 second flat darks
  • 30 4 second darks
  • 30 10 second darks

Processing geek info:

• PixInsight
• BlurXterminator
• NoiseXterminator
• StarXterminator
• NormalizedScaleGradient