Comet Garradd - first view

The weather is not that cooperating in Kuala Lumpur for the past months. However occasionally the sky opens up revealing some stars (hardly reach 3rd magnitude!). The haze was thick and never seems to go away.

Not wanting to waste any time, and missed the opportunity of capturing my first comet using a CCD, I decided to give it a go.

Comet Garradd seems to be quiet large, but the tail is kinda difficult to see the whole stretch. I've googled the comet's photo and a lot shows the tail to be pretty impressive.

Well, most probably the haze and the scattering of lights from Kuala Lumpur, making it somewhat drown inside the sky glow.

Anyway, I'm pretty pleased with my first CCD image of a comet. The image is Luminance only, and even though I have the RGB data sets, I am still trying to find some ways of processing it and making it look presentable.

I came across the blog by AstroSwanny, and how to process the comet in  LRGB. Will give it a try soon.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rotating my boring flat Jupiter image into a 3D globe using WinJUPOS and vpython

Image
Recently, the sky cleared up suddenly over in my place. Which was a rarity in itself. And since Jupiter is high up in the sky passing the meridian just before midnight, I grabbed that opportunity to image it just like any other night. And then, I remember saw Micheal Philips old post about rendering Jupiter into a 3D globe and generate a fly-by video. I think I saw a tutorial somewhere in youtube, but simply couldn't find it. Either it has been removed, or I was just imagining it.. syyyy.. Luckily nowadays we have a new friend, ChatGPT to help with the research. after a lot of wrong prompts and refining the scope, I finally found a way.  So here it is Step - 1 (Summary). Generate the complete processed Jupiter photos as usual, using Autostakkert, Winjupos. I used imppg for sharpening (seems to be working much better than PixInsight! ), and back and forth to PixInsight for color balance and other cosmetic stuffs. Step - 2. (Winjupos) Open back the final TIF in Winjupos. Do Image Mea...
Read more

A Picture Perfect Moment!

Image
While doing a 30 sec exposure of myself in front of the giant 30" Dobsonian telescope, the very bright sporadic meteor appear right on top of the Pleiades! I saw it at the corner of my eye, but since the 30 second exposure was still in progress, I had to keep my excitement to myself until the exposure is finish! I was glad it turned out nicely. I've tried to photograph meteors for several years, and this was actually my very first successful shot!   What else can I say, an upside-down Orion rising, starry nights despite the Moon still up the sky and causing shadows around the observing site, big Dobsonians to view the southern sky and a meteor passing near the Pleiades! .... a picture perfect moment! Oh yeah, this was taken during the Post-Eclipse Star Safari event, organized by 3RF AUstralia, at Coonabarabran, Australia on the weekend of 17-18 Nov 2012.
Read more

I'm back... on blogspot!

Image
 Ok, this is embarrassing. My last post here was 12 years ago!!!  I do have another web called FalakOnline.net , and malay language-based website dedicated to my local Malaysian followers.  But I think it's about time ... again.. to start writing for my english-speaking pals. I've shared most of my work on ... ehemm.. twitter/x , and now on bluesky . My facebook page is mostly for my Malaysian friends.  I do have a flickr page which I haven't update for some time. But trying to explain details on my imaging adventures on social media like x and bluesky proved to be a pain. I guess I need to really get back 'blogging'. So here it is.. thanks to shoutout from Dylan on youtube on my recent video on Jupiter 3d flyby...   I'm back!!! BTW, I've renamed this page to shahgazer.blogspot.com, the old one was astronomytechnology.blogspot.com (which sounded really goofy after all these years)
Read more