I also caught the comet

Would you look at that, finally another post about taking photos of the night sky.

After seeing all those cool photos of the C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS comet on Mastodon, I decided I need to join the craze and try to hunt it myself. At the first attempt I went to a nearby hill and tried to see it with binoculars, but to no success. So the next night I went all in, packed my DSLR, a 17-40 and a 50mm lens, a tripod, and drove to found a good spot.

I’m a big fan of wind turbines (pun kinda intended), so I came up with the idea that combining a comet with one of those would be cool. There’s a wind farm (is that a name for a group of wind turbines?) not far from my place, so I went there, and even managed to find a place to park.

I got the best results with the 50mm f/1.8 lens. The camera is my old Canon 1200D, astromodified. The exposure time was 4 seconds at f/3.2, ISO 1600.

And here it is, with all its comet glory:

(click on the photo for a larger version)

I’m rather content how nice the tail turned out. With some slight curves manipulation I was able to pull it out of the surrounding sky.

And of course, if you zoom in, you will count at least three satellite streaks. The night sky is becoming a mess.

If you want to hunt for the comet yourself, I highly recommend Stellarium, both the desktop version and the mobile app. As for the desktop version, you will need to add the comet manually, there’s a really good blog post on how to do it: How to add a comet to Stellarium.

And there’s also Heavens Above. HA is not only a great resource on everything happening in the sky, it’s also a manifest on “if it works, don’t change it”. I don’t think the webpage look changed in any way since I first saw it somewhere around 2005.

As for my astrophotography journey in general, I got fed up with trying to make my mount work, so I am sending it to a person that services mounts. I hope he will be able to fix it, or at least find the cause of all my issues. And once the mount is back and fixed, I should be able to go back to the game. I also have a plan to switch my astro controller to a Pi 5 with an NVME drive, which should give much, much better performance. I will of course report how it goes.

Thanks for reading!

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