C/2017 T2 (PanSTARRS) is a near-parabolic comet that was discovered in 2017. The comet will reach closest-approach tonight (Dec 29th) at ~1.5 AU from earth, and at it's furthest distance (aphelion) it will swing all the way out to 15,000 AU. I grabbed these images last night over a two-hour time period. The orbital period is about 651,000 years so none of us will see this fellow again!
The comet is ~11 magnitude right now, so not visible by eye but maybe with some good binoculars and clear skies.
Subs:
- 50x120s Luminance @ 200 gain / 50 offset
Hardware:
- ASI1600mm Pro
- Orion 8” f3/9 astrograph
- AP1100 GTO mount
- Moonlight focuser
- ASI120mini and generic 60mm guidescope
Location:
- Bortle 4-4.5 ish
- Clear skies, “average” seeing, “average” transparency
Pixinsight Processing:
- Calibrate, star registration
- PixelMath to normalize background on all images to one reference image
- ABE
- HistogramStretch
- Curves
- MultiScaleLinearTransform to knock down some noise (since there's no stacking)
- Resize, Crop
- Blink, create movie, use frames from movie to create gif
- Invert subs, re-do step 8 to create inverted gif
(Most of this done in image containers so that all subs could be processed the same)