Final Comet Hunt (for now)

That’s it – no more hours trying to capture the E3 comet! It’s been a tricky little blighter; difficult to find, shoot, stack and process. I’ve been out there for four nights (with only a 50% success rate on actually capturing it), so last night, with 3 hours of data was the end of my relationship with C/2022 E3 (ZTC) until it comes back again in about 50,000 years!

I managed just over three hours of pretty good images before the cloud rolled in (then typically disappeared just after I packed up)

Tried a different approach to stacking – this time I did two stacks; one with the stars aligned and another with the comet aligned. This enabled the two results to be processed differently.

Firstly, the images before any stretching or processing…

Exciting eh? Now after lots of stretching and processing…

So that’s it (till the next comet I suppose), time to turn my attention to other more predictable objects on the next few clear nights!