Comet C/2023 E1 (ATLAS)

[Ross Wilkinson]

This comet was only discovered at the beginning of March and now has a reported magnitude around 12: but it has a large and diffuse coma, so it appeared much fainter to me when I found it last night, virtually overhead (close to Megrez in Ursa Major):

This is a stack of 56x 1-min from my Mx716 on the C8 operating at f/3.5 (the gap in the star-trails was due to my meridian-flip).

It was so faint that I needed to use my "invisible comet" process to stack this image. The adjacent "bright" star is only 10th magnitude.

[Ross Wilkinson]

Three and a half months later I had another opportunity to catch this comet. 

It had brightened to magnitude 8 in July, but by the end of August was still around 9th magnitude when I found it in Pegasus:

That's a stack of 60x 1-minute from the Mx716 camera on my C8, operting at f/3.5