{"id":11165,"date":"2009-02-16T01:00:07","date_gmt":"2009-02-16T11:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/?p=11165"},"modified":"2013-10-27T10:50:51","modified_gmt":"2013-10-27T20:50:51","slug":"comet-144p-kushida","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/?p=11165","title":{"rendered":"Comet 144P Kushida"},"content":{"rendered":"

I took advantage of a clear evening to do a little more driveway astrophotography. The target was comet 144P Kushida. The comet is nearly at the Zenith in the evening, very conveniently placed with ample time to take more than a few frames.<\/p>\n

The setup was fairly typical for me, the Canon 20Da and the TV-76 shooting for over 40 minutes (10 frames at 4 min each). The frames were calibrated and stacked in Images Plus and post proccessed with Photoshop and FITS Liberator. I followed Jerry Lodgriss’ instructions for preserving and enhancing the star colors<\/a> with pleasing results. I suspect I will be using this technique more in the future and star colors are something that has always frustrated me.<\/p>\n

\"144P\/Kushida\"<\/a>
Comet 144P Kushida, 20 x 2min exposures w\/180mm lens @ f2.8 and IDAS LP Filter, 15 Feb 2009<\/figcaption><\/figure>Since I have a CCD camera co-boresighted with the TV-76mm refractor I was able to use the CCD to take frames simultaneously. This arrangement is convenient as I can use the CCD for finding and framing the target, the field of view is very similar between the two cameras. I spent time early in the evening to carefully align the CCD to match the view in the refractor. There is also a small 10cm SCT in the setup for use as a autoguider scope, but I have not been using this lately. I suspect I will try some longer exposures of C\/2007 N3 Lulin in a few days and will need the guider.<\/p>\n

The comet itself was fairly straightforward, a round coma with no real tail, a slight off centered shape to the coma. The cyanogen green comes through nicely, very apparent when processing the color planes separately. It is moving fairly slowly, for the DSLR photo I aligned on the stars and only had slight issues with the comet trailing. For the CCD image I aligned the images on the comet, showing some trailing in the stars.<\/p>\n

The CCD frames do not show any sign of a tail or other structure either. This is not surprising as 144P Kushida is usually a fairly dim comet that is bright only due to material from an outburst a couple months ago. It is not a highly active comet with jets, tail and all of the other features that can make comet photography so interesting.<\/p>\n

\"144P\/Kushida\"<\/a>
Comet 144P Kushida passing through heavy starfield in Taurus on the evening of 15 Feb 2009, stack of 10 x 4min exposures with a Canon 20Da and TV-76mm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I took advantage of a clear evening to do a little more driveway astrophotography. The target was comet 144P Kushida. The comet is nearly at the Zenith in the evening, very conveniently placed with ample time to take more than a few frames. The setup was fairly typical for me, the Canon 20Da and the … Continue reading “Comet 144P Kushida”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[34],"tags":[1409,1411,337,1410],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11165"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11165"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11171,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11165\/revisions\/11171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}