ISON and Spica From the 
Balcony observing location 
November 18, 2013

 
 There
            are times during a full moon when you must get out and do some
            imaging. As comet ISON races toward its destiny on the 28th of
            November, I can still get it for about half an hour in the east
            before the start of morning twilight with the 80mm astrograph
            on the balcony. The full moon made for a very deep blue sky and
            had to be subtracted out before any real tail was to be seen
            in this image. Signal to noise was very low indeed! The comet
            has over a full field now of tail, and it shows some bifurcation
            and disconnection events. Spica is the brilliant star to the
            upper right. The comet was around mag 6 during this session,
            and the tail is still ultra faint. With the bright moonlight,
            it was certainly not naked eye by any means, and only the head
            was faintly seen in binoculars.

            
ISON - this is a 21 minute total 
integration time with the Canon Xti at
ISO 400.  Frames were averaged due to
an extremely high background brightness.

Select an image size for a larger view:

1290 x 960
            



Lens:  80mm f/6 Stellarvue / Zeiss APO with TV.8x FR
Platform:  Televue GEM 
Exposure:  21m = 21 x 1m 
Location:  Payson, Arizona
Elevation:  5150 ft.
Sky:  Seeing  7/10, Transparency 8/10
Outside Temperature:  40F
Processing Tools:  Maxim DL, Photoshop CS2
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