Ooh, a comet

Jan 28, 2015 03:15


A few weeks ago, my foxy friend mentioned that there was a pretty bright comet in the skies: C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy). There was too much light around here to see it with the naked eye, but it was easy to photograph with a digital camera and an exposure of a few seconds. It sure is green :) I also took a look at it through my Astroscan telescope that I got as a kid, but it didn't look very interesting-just a fuzzy dim green blob.

I had heard about the technique of "stacking" multiple exposures to reduce noise, so I gave it a try. Here's what I got out of 65 10-second exposures on a Sony DSC-RX100 camera, taken on the night of January 19, 2015:



Comet Lovejoy and the Pleiades

I fiddled with the levels to try to make the comet's tail more visible; it's still not very bright, but it was pretty much lost in the noise and invisible in the individual exposures. Anyways, I thought it was pretty neat and am pleased with the results :)
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