Binocular comet Catalina, Lahti, Nastola

Already in the autumn, the Catalina route in the sky was studied from star chart programs, and now, during the most severe frosts, a comet happened to fly past the spherical constellations M3 and NGC 5466. So it only helped to put the layers on top and hope the car would start.

-27.5c, that's what the meter looked like when it got to the scene.

However, the session didn't quite work out. Finding the right composition took time out of the frost because of the stiff ball head and shaky pedestal. After more than thirty pictures, the monitoring gave up power, but the photographer didn't notice this while warming up in the car. Due to the frozen toes and frustration, even the taking of flattened pictures was delayed.

When adjusting the pictures at home, it was quite clear that decent pictures of the deep sky had not been processed since last winter, as much as the game shops with PixInsight were lost. Eventually, inspired by the relentless color gradients, I ended up making the image a mere black-and-white version in Photar. The color image will come later after the quality moments spent with better fluttering images and tutorials.

That is, the landscape is distorted horizontally. Catalina on the left, NGC 5466 in the middle, Messier 3 on the right. The tail would appear to be at least 3 to 4 degrees on the comet.

As a bonus, a video loop of Catalina with a star flight. Larger HTML5 version: https://gfycat.com/MarvelousThatAsiandamselfly

This description has been automatically translated from Finnish. Click here to see the original text.

2 0

Newest observations

Contact information

Binocular comet Catalina - 8.1.2016 at 04.18 Lahti, Nastola Observation number 47369