4th Jan 2022: four comets in one night!

[Ross Wilkinson]

As well as chairing our meeting on Zoom, I did manage to catch all four of the comets which I'd been waiting for.

The first was 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann, high up in Taurus:

This has frequent outbursts and I've imaged it before back in 2018.

This time it's quite diffuse, so it wasnt' visible in my individual 1-minute exposures and I needed to use my "invisible comet" process to stack it.

Next I had a look at C/2019 L3 (ATLAS), which was much brighter, but lower down in Gemini:

Then I moved on to 4P/Faye, which I'd imaged back in 2006. I found it in a star-field full of faint stars, so the "invisible comet" process was needed again for stacking:

And finally just before 10pm I moved on to 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (the target of the Rosetta mission), which was rising above the trees to the East. This proved to be the most spectacultar (sporting a visible tail), but by then the clouds had started to arrive, so I only managed a couple of ten-minute bursts:

At least I now know which two targets to concentrate on tonight...

[Ross Wilkinson]

With no clouds to contend with, I could concentrate on the two brighter comets which I'd "discovered" the previous night.

I set up the 'scope just after 7pm and first took C/2019 L3 (ATLAS) with 91x 1-min using my Mx716 camera on the C8 operating at f/3.5.

Then by 9:30pm 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was just clearing the trees, so I collected 65x 1-minute exposures before packing away.