45p 20170216 cschur

 This comet is moving past the Earth this week, and as you can see in the image here the comet is moving rapidly against the stellar background so fast as to produce long trails in even a short 25 mins of luminance. The longest exposure I could do without trailing the comet was around 30 seconds! A very low surface brightness visually, this comet now near 7th magnitude was too dim to see clearly in the finder and is spread out over much of a degree or more.


Lens:  12.5" f/5 Home bult Newtonian
Platform:  Astrophysics AP1200 
Exposure:  30m LRGB
Location:  Payson, Arizona
Elevation:  5150 ft.
Sky:  Seeing  7/10, Transparency 8/10
Outside Temperature:  30F
Processing Tools:  Maxim DL, Photoshop CS2