Mike's Astro Photos

Here’s a quick photo of Comet 168P/Hergenrother. This comet just reached its perihelion (closest point in orbit) on 1 October 2012. The photo below was created with a 1 minute exposure of RGB and 2 minutes of Luminance. There’s a good bit of noise in this image, but I figured out a bunch of tricks for taking and processing comet images while I was shooting this series. It was a productive session and my next round of comet photos should be much better. There’s a few tricks to photographing comets well (just like everything) and I look forward to shooting this guy again before he travels too far away. Check out the pair of faint distant galaxies in the lower right corner.

Comet 168P/Hergenrother – October 6th, 2012

And here’s an animation of 10 frames of the comet. Each exposure is 30 seconds and there is an aproximate 300 second break in between each frame.

Animation of Comet 168p/Hergenrother from October 6th 2012

Photo Details
Comet 168P/Hergenrother
RGB 60 seconds 120 seconds Lum
Total exposure 2 hours 30 minutes
Camera: Apogee U16M
Guider: SBIG 402 with MMOAG Off Axis Guider
Telescope: RCOS 14.5
Mount: Paramount ME
Location: Freeland MD
Date: 10/6/2012
Software: The SkyX, MaximDL, FocusMax, CCDAutoPilot, CCDStack, Photoshop