Comet Panstarrs C/2011 L4
Comet in Cepheus
For May 22, 2013
Uploaded 5/22/13
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May 27th the Earth will pass through the orbital plane of the
comet, making the sun ward spike we have been starting to see
for weeks at its best. But this morning was the very last day
you could get barely 30 minutes of dark sky to image the comet
because of the nearly full moon. After today, its all over! So
I was out this morning taking my last ever shot of the comet
with its amazing anti tail clearly seen here as the massive sun
ward spike pointing to the left in this set of images. A short
fan tail of the normal type points to the right. Thats all most
comet have, even at orbital plane crossing, but this object is
very special. The comet is currently around 7.5th magnitude in
Cepheus very near the north celestial pole making imaging challenging
so close to Polaris. This set was tracked on the comets head
and thus the stars a trailed slightly from the comets motion
through them. This is a combined exposure of 24 minutes with
the 80mm Stellarvue APO from Payson. Good bye Panstarrs, you
went out with a bang! |
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Conventional image, the field here
is 4 degrees wide!
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Negative presentation to show the
tails better
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Color mapped to show the huge width and
length of the tails
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Lens: Stellarvue SV80s
Platform: Televue GEM
Exposure: 24m total
Location: Payson, Arizona
Elevation: 5150 ft.
Sky: Seeing 7/10, Transparency 8/10
Outside Temperature: 42F
Processing Tools: Maxim DSLR, Photoshop CS2
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