I wasn’t going to image this evening. My health hasn’t been the best recently, two of my kids have Covid, and my head just isn’t in it. But in the end, it turned out I couldn’t sleep anyway, so I setup in the end and put some more time in on the Iris Nebula and also the Dumbbell Nebula. I also went comet hunting…and found one!
Actually I didn’t “find” it. It’s already been discovered, so when I “found” it, I was going off of its known right ascension and declination coordinates as per The Sky Live. The information was right on the money, and suddenly I was looking at a comet in the constellation Ophiuchus.
I only put in about half an hour of 60 second subs at 270 gain, 340 offset using the ASI178MC, but it was still enough to make out quite distinct movement against the background stars.
With K2 coming up to it’s closest approach to Earth in the next week or so, no doubt I’ll put some more time in on this and try and bring out more of its coma and tail. But for the half hour I have on it at the moment, I’m pretty happy with it.
I’ll leave you with the image itself, and if I do get some more time on it, I’ll be sure to update this post. Thank you for reading and clear skies all.
AstroHeart UK Photography 