Comet 333P LINEAR

[Ross Wilkinson]

This comet was discovered by the LINEAR survey in 2007 and has a retrograde orbit with a period of just under nine years.

It passed through perihelion at the end of November and was only around 11th magnitude when I caught it last Thursday.

I'd not set up my 8" SCT since January, so it took me a little longer than I'd expected to get the comet in view. Then I realised that it was moving quickly across the sky, so I had to re-point the 'scope after half an hour.

That's a stack of 60x 1-min exposures with my Mx716 CCD camera on the back of my C8, operating at f/3.5.

After my usual calibration and re-alignent in IRIS, I tried the "Winsorized Sigma clipping" in SiriL for the first time, to separate the comet from the trailed starfield. Then I used GIMP to paste the comet layer over the background stars.