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Old 31-December-2007, 09:39 PM
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iceman iceman is offline
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Location: Gosford, Australia
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Arrow Two Comets - 8P/Tuttle and 17P/Holmes in a widefield

This was taken the other night (30th December) at our local darkish sky site, at Mangrove Mountain, between 9:30pm and 10pm local time.

Conditions were great early on, which let me capture this widefield view with both comets. Clouds spoiled the opportunity to get a close-up image of them through my ED80.

Taken with my Canon 350D + Sigma 17-70mm lens (@ 33mm), f/4.0. Piggybacked on top of my ED80 on EQ6, auto-guided with a DMK21AU04.

The shot is a stack of 4x 120s exposures @ ISO800, ICNR on. Added and DDP in ImagesPlus, gradient removal and noise reduction in Photoshop.
The second image is annotated showing the objects in the FOV.

I'm glad to have captured this image, but was disappointed not to be able to do more during the night.

They're too big to upload here (200kb), so some links:
Two Comets - 8P/Tuttle and 17P/Holmes
Annotated

Thanks for looking.
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