Running 3.5 Magnitude and with 2 degrees of tail easily visible to the naked eye, this comet provided a 20 minute window of opportunity above the trees and in a dark moonless sky last night. The Green channel was very bright, as is the final RGB image. Star trails from tracking on a rapidly moving comet are multicolored from stacking the individual color frames to form the final image. I had to manually guide on the nucleus of the comet to get this image, between exposures, I recentered the comet manually to keep the comet from moving off the shot.

Instrument:  12.5" f/5 Home made Newtonian
Platform:  Astrophysics 1200 QMD
CCD Camera:  SBIG ST8i NABG
Guider: Manual Guiding on Nucleus
Exposure:  LRGB = 16:4:4:8 (RGB Binned 2x2)
RGB Combine Ratio:  1: .8: 2.4
Filters:  RGB Tricolor
Location:  Payson, Arizona
Elevation:  5150 ft.
Sky:  Seeing FWHM = 5 arcsec  Transparency 8/10
Outside Temperature:  20 C
CCD Temperature:  -20 C
Processing Tools:  Maxim DL, Photoshop, AIP4WIN, PW Pro

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