C/2011 L4 PANSTARRS and Errai May 5 2013 09:53 UT

Via Flickr:
Comet PANSTARRS as seen on Sunday night/Monday morning.

My only photo of this object so far. I resisted the chances to take pictures of it earlier in the season. Only once I was able to see it when up at Montebello through Yangzhe Liu's telescope did I finally take the picture.

This is the sum of two 10 minute exposures tracked on the comet. I'd never tracked on a comet before and was pleased to see that Maxim kinda did OK with it. Had to stack in DSS with only two exposures and the software didn't automatically pick up on the comet location. I just stacked without alignment.

Calibration was done in Maxim with some old, non-matched darks that I had. Thus there are hot pixels and bad amp glow that I removed by cropping.

Final processing in Pix Insight and a pass through LR3 to remove a flare from Errai.

Same hardware setup as I usually use: SV4 with the modified and cooled Pentax K10D camera set to ISO 100.

Comments