Comet 62P - from California!

[Ross Wilkinson]

Comet 62P/Tsuchinshan was discovered in Japan in 1965 and has a period of around six years. I managed to image it back in 2017, thanks to remote telescopes in Tenerife and New Mexico, but during the present apparition it has been an early-morning object through its perihelion passage.

Since it won't be visible in my evening sky for a couple more months (by which time it will have faded considerably), I enlisted the help of my friend Gary Hawkins and his Blossom Valley Observatory near San Diego. Gary has recently added a WO RedCat 51 wide-field refractor to his system, so this was a great opportunity to try it out. Gary provided me with a set of 51x 2-minute captures from his ASI533MC camera, which I've just been processing in SiriL:

On that evening (12-13 Feb), the comet was almost stationary in the sky (moving at just 5 arc-sec per hour), so I didn't need to do any additional re-registration on the comet. And we also got several background galaxies including NGC4608, NGC4596 and NGC4578 in the field too.