Mike's Astro Photos

Comet C/2012 K5 (LINEAR) was discovered by Lincoln Laboratory Near-Earth Asteroid Research project in May of 2012. The comet is just now starting to get bright (magnitude 10) and is in a convient location for night time viewing. I spent a few hours last night checking out the comet and taking some photos. Here’s a color photo of the comet taken with 20 minutes of luminous data and 1.5 minutes of RGB data (30 seconds each). The comet is moving fast against the stars which makes imaging it a bit of a challenge. The trick is to filter out all of the star trails and just stack the comet, and then combine that with an RGB picture of the star field. Here’s my first attempt at this method.

Comet C/2012 K5 (LINEAR) – December 19th, 2012

 
Without the extra processing to remove the trailing stars, the image looks like this.
 

Comet C/2012 K5 (LINEAR) – December 19th, 2012

This comet can be seen with a low powered telescope, binoculars, or even a DSLR camera. Its currently inside the big dipper the next couple of nights. Refer to the star map below for placement over the next few months.

Star Map of Comet C/2012 K5

Star map courtesy of Seiichi Yoshida.