Comet Catalina US10
in the morning sky
November 22, 2015


 


            
 This is one
            of the very first sightings post perihelion of this new comet
            in the US. I had a mere 5 minutes to see and shoot this comet,
            as it was barely 1 - 2 degrees up in the east, just as the sky
            was getting very bright at 5:45 am from the coming morning twilight.
            Visually, this 6th magnitude object was small, round and condensed
            in the center with no tails visible. This was with my venerable
            35mm Panoptic eyepiece and the SV80. I then quickly switched
            over to the camera which had been pre focused earlier and took
            a series of 30 second exposures to avoid overexposure. I ended
            up with two different images, a stack of three 30s shots each.


            
The comet was barely
            visible for the first shot, and then when I checked again a few
            minutes later, was lost in the blue morning twilight! I shot
            the second shot then, and it caught the comet anyway. The use
            of my manual setting circles on this old mount was crucial to
            finding this comet amongst the bright glow.


            
A slightly curved gas pointing upward,
and a narrow dust fan pointing downward
can be seen here, when the comet was 
about 1 degree up and still in a somewhat
dark sky.
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Zooming in and making a high contrast
negative shows the extent of the
two tails
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Taken a few minutes later, the bright blue
morning glow was washing the comet out.
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Lens:  Stellarvue SV80s f/6 - AKA "Zeiss APO" - with Televue .8x FR/CC
Platform:  Astrophysics AP1200 
Camera: Hutech Canon XTi at ISO 400
Exposure:  1.5m RGB (30s x 3)
Location:  Payson, Arizona
Elevation:  5150 ft.
Sky:  Seeing  5/10, Transparency 8/10
Outside Temperature:  32F
Processing Tools:  Maxim DL, Photoshop CS2
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