I went out at 9PM on the night of 1/26/23 to photograph the now famous “green comet.” I used the backyard Stellarvue 5″ APO astrograph. The comet was low in the north-northwestern horizon. There were powerlines in my field of view, but at least there were no tree limbs.
The image below is a composite of 5, 60-sec and 20, 120-sec frames taken at ISO 800. I haven’t stacked comet images in a while; so, it took me much of the day to figure out how to do it in a manner that would align the comet images that were moving relative to the Earth’s motion. The final image is a fuzz ball without much of a discernable tail. Perhaps images with a wider field instrument taken from a higher latitude would have revealed some of the cometary tail. With some imagination, we can see a slight tail extending upward and to the left of the comet’s head.
Alas, here in downtown Austin, we take what we can get.
