Friday, January 25, 2013

Finding a Lemmon...

Trying to get some comet images using a DMK51 and a 26mm lens seems like a fun thing to do at the moment. There is some madness in this method, or visa versa. I had tried without success to get comet C/2012 T5 Bressi, it is to faint and my skies are not dark enough. But I put this test image into Flickr astrometry.net, wide FOV bressi it shows that the FOV I have with this lens is about 15x10 degrees. This means I have a big ball park to catch some thing reasonably bright.

The next good night I tried for a brighter comet, the problem being it is on the lower southern limits of my horizon, just above the garage roof. Pointed the camera at the area indicated patch of sky. The result was good. A summed image of 27x20sec frames shows comet C/2012 F6 Lemmon in the right spot, according to CDC charts.

Update - 20130127 - Using Th ED80mm and DMK51 , after some hunting around, as my scope was not properly aligned. I found C/2012 F6 Lemmon as a faint fuzzy. Got 50x19.472sec images with the gain set at 150 and gamma set at 100. A summed image from these frames is here, some ImageJ pixel pushing has been done to bring out the comet. Moving images below..