woohoo Comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon
We hit the back yard last night at 19:00edt and spent the next hour imaging and observing Comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon, Comet C/2025 R2 Swan and I think she got a 3rd comet last night.
Yes there was cloud but intermittent and the sucker holes were more than big enough for the ZWO SeeStar S50 to get a lot of frames.
I was shooting with a tripod, a Canon T7I and a 75-300mm zoom lens.
There are always issues with this setup.. when you change the focal length, the focus change as well. Things are too dark to see in the Live view so I would have to go to Arcturus, zoom in on the live view to focus as best as possible, move the camera back to approx where the comet was and then hunt, expose, hunt, expose, until I found it again. I am seriously thinking about piggybacking a laser pointer onto the camera!
In any event I could not find the )(&#$@ Lemmon for over 30 minutes. We had it in binocs and the S50 but with my rig, nothing.
And then suddenly at 19:34 EDT there it was! Obvious and Bright!. I have included the previous image at 19:31 EDT… nothing!
The focal length went from 75mm to 80mm, a negligible amount and yet I can’t match star fields across the two images. Frustrating!
I’ve had to shrink down the attached images as the originals are 6000×400 pixels and 9MB large. ISO was 12800 for most of these.
All are unprocessed unless mentioned otherwise.
19:31 EDT no comet
19:34 edt Comet!
Zoomed in a lot, focus goes to @(#$&@#4
19:40 edtFL=230mm F5, 6sec
Swing back to Arcturus, liveview, zoom, refocus, swing back to about where the comet was and hunt and search for another 5 images.. found it!
19:42 edt FL=220mm, F5, 5sec
still working on a series of 7 stacked images.
Autostakkert does not work well at all for non-planetary stacking.
learning how to use Siril now.