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Here is a test
shot taken last night of the comet, now 5th magnitude in Auriga
and fading fast. The two dust tail features - The primary dust
fan and secondary anti tail have now remerged into one brighter
curving fan. The gas tail can be faintly seen, it has been fading
rapidly since perihelion. The comet is not too impressive visually,
a round fuzzy ball with a small extension on one side. It is
more of an imagers comet!
With only a half
an hour of darkness before the moon came up last night, I did
some more testing of the new Atik 16200 camera. I don't have
any filters or filter wheel yet, so it was a "Luminance"
shot, only in black and white. Still the camera performed flawlessly,
taking about 16 seconds per frame to download each 16 Megapixel
frame. Also tested was the cameras larger APS-H chip (35mm diagonal)
with the Nexus 0.75x coma corrector. This coma corrector was
designed to be used with the much smaller APS-C chips and it
was a pleasant surprise how well it did with this larger chip.
At f/2.9 the images do have a lot of vignetting, about 1 - 1.5
stops darker in the corners. The flats removed this just fine,
but you can see the corners are a bit noisier.
Overall, the experiment
was a success, and if I ever need a wider 2.5 degree field for
larger comets in the future, this is the super fast setup to
use!
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Lens: 10" f/2.9 GSO Astrograph Newtonian w/Nexus corrector
Platform: Astrophysics AP1200
Camera: Atik 16200 CCD
Exposure: 30mins
Location: Payson, Arizona
Elevation: 5150 ft.
Sky: Seeing 6/10, Transparency 6/10
Outside Temperature: 32F
Processing Tools: Maxim DL, Photoshop CS2
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