Sunday 30 December 2007

Two comets in one picture

After a week of clouds, the 29th December was a clear day. So in the evening I took the opportunity to bicycle 25 minutes to my dark spot "De Wilck" (Cospar 4354) a few km outside the town, with my new small portable Meade ETX-70 rich-field telescope.

The goal: getting some pictures of comets 17P/Holmes and 8P/Tuttle with my small Canon Ixus compact camera piggyback on the telescope.

I managed to shoot a nice picture showing both comets in one wide-field image, with the galaxies M31 and M33 as a bonus. It is shown below: it is a stack of 8 photographs exposed 15 seconds each.

(click image to enlarge)


I also made a series of images of 17P/Holmes with the Ixus zoomed in at maximum. Unfortunately, after 13 images the battery of the camera was empty. Below is the stack of these 13 photographs, exposed 15 seconds each with the ETX-70 as guiding scope:

(click image to enlarge)

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