Here's my take on Comet 21P. Data taken from my backyard with a Tak E130D reflector through the old Canon T3i. 72 x 60 seconds lights, 20 darks, 40 flats, 60 bias frames. Processed though PixInsight. Lights collected on 9/10/2018.
It was my first sojourn with the Tak E130D. I spent the whole day (4-5 hours) trying to the get
the collimation figured out. It's a horrible system. When you move one of the three rear screws, it CHANGES what the other two screws do. If one screw moved the laser up and down, after you change another screw, that prior screw then moves the laser right and left. There is a chance it will work predictably, then with one more turn, it moves un-predictably.
It took me a week of trying to figure out how to get "CometAlignment" to work in PixInsight. Like all new processes in PI, the learning curve was steep and I had to redo portions of the image over and over. Online tutorials are awful as they cover a previous version of the process. I took 7 pages of notes trying to understand the setttings. Toward the end, I figured out I could improve the image by starting all over again, but at this point, that's not going to happen. Hopefully, I can apply what I learned to 46P/Wirtanen in December.
The comet was barely visible through 8x40 binocs. The head of the comet was quite apparent as a large fuzzy and faint star. The tail was not apparent at all visually.
No comments:
Post a Comment