New comet tracking feature C/2022 E3 (ZTF) Scottsdale, AZ

[donstim]

Great to hear that you may be able to try to stack the stars and the comet separately. I was going to ask if that was possible, but thought it might have been a stupid question! I like the results you can get on the comet with comet "tracking", but don't really care for the (what looks to me like) over-emphasized star trails, and especially when tracking is not perfect as seems to be the case in some of the photos here.

[admin]

Hi,

yes, will be looking at this when I get some time. May be tricky though - if the star mask isn't accurate then it might cover too little area around a star (meaning that the core of the star will be extracted but you will be left with a trail made up of rings of light from the outer portions)...

cheers,

Robin

[RonAM]

46E55771-E422-4661-BB20-2A6D33AAA928.jpeg (252.81 KiB) Viewed 1028 times

This capture used half-second exposure per frame, 5-minutes total with SharpCap pro. That keeps the stars and comet in fixed relative position. The comet tracking images are cool as they provide a sense of motion for the comet against the background stars but I also like to see everything together as well. I used a Canon 50mm FD lens at f2.8 mounted on my ZWO ASI294MC pro camera, no filters. It’s not an Astro quality lens but provided the wide field I desired. Cropped to reduce file size to post here.

[RonAM]

No tracking either- simple tripod mount. Used SharpCap livestack to follow the moving field without tracking. That also ends up cropping the image but with wide field and 5 minutes total time I still get about 70% of the total frame. Additional cropping to 50% size to meet <1 MB posting requirements.