C/2024 E1 Wierzchos - another "invisible" comet

[Ross Wilkinson]

This is the comet which I mentioned during last Tuesday's meeting: faint (10th magnitude) and low down in the South-West after sunset.

On Thursday evening (19th Mar) I set up an imaging system consisting of my StarlightXpress Hx916 camera fitted with a Pentax 200mm telephoto lens on a Celestron Alt-Az tracking mount. This was carefully positioned in the gap between the houses, screened from the streetlamp on the opposite side of the road: the only location from where I could see that part of the sky.

I managed to collect image data of that region for an hour:

The field-rotation of my tracking mount is evident, but I'd managed to keep the target region (circled in yellow) in view throughout.

The next morning I used my custom Python program to re-align the individual frames so I could stack them accounting for the comet's motion and could just about see a stationary object in the field:

That's 75x 30-sec with the Hx916 and a 200mm lens at f/6.3. The contrast was limited by a slightly hazy sky and light scattered from that streetlamp.

[Ross Wilkinson]

After further contrast enhancement: