Comet C/2021 A1

Astrnmrtom

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Thomas M
After being skunked by the weather for most of the month I was finally able to grab some images of Comet C/2021 A1 Leonard. Images aren't perfect because I only did a rough polar alignment of my mount so stars drifted a little on longer exposures. 10 second exposure resembles how it looked visually in my 94mm Refractor, and the stubby tail was visible in binoculars too. 30 second exposure shows structure in the tail which is probably the ion and dust tails. The sunward side of the coma shows some green glow.

a6000 @ prime focus, 94mm f/7 refractor. I denoised the 30 second exposure, and both images have a little histogram stretch in Affinity Photo. You can see the tracking drift in the 30 second exposure. This was taken from just west of Mobile Alabama at 31 degrees North latitude. Comet became first visible when at about 10 degrees altitude in the evening twilight, around 6pm central time.

CometLeonard2021Dec10SecExposure.jpg
  • ILCE-6000
  • 10 sec
  • ISO 1000
2021Dec23CometLeonard.jpg
  • ILCE-6000
  • 30 sec
  • ISO 1600
 
I did a strong histogram stretch to bring out detail in the tail. Makes for an ugly noisy image but there's a lot of structure there.

LeonardHistogramStretch.jpg
  • ILCE-6000
  • 30 sec
  • ISO 1600
 
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