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Nice. Your stars are always nicely round across the field. The Hyperstar has such a tight critical focus zone. And I don’t always get it right!
Friends have reported the Celestron NexYZ is excellent – stable but adequately adjustable. But this is second hand; no experience myself.
Good image. I suspected there would be significant constraints but didn’t know the detail – the idea was probably put forward by that comet Hergenrother journalist!
Yes. I think I read somewhere that if the comet interceptor mission had already been deployed, this would have been one helluva target.
The comet moved away from a mag 13.4 star and I managed to get a set of frames before the sky started brightening noticeably. The sky was excellent though and I saw Sirius rising! Taken through a Baader V filter.
I certainly agree with you on the effect of the internet. On a brighter note – I was pleasantly surprised last night by being able to pick up tails on 260P and C/2018 N2. I imagine light-buckets are required though for visual observers.
Don’t be too hard on yourself, Dominic. I did in fact do a bit of web searching to see where the Mirror journalist may have got this information. And I had a look at in the sky.org . Your site had nothing about 21:15 being the best time to spot the comet, nor did your site say it was super bright (it wasn’t even in the top three brightest comets) / even in the naked eye range.
We should do a correction. Simply everything is wrong. The picture doesn’t look like an artist’s impression to me, it looks like an image of another comet; the comet is very very dim (one 2019 obs on COBS ~ mag 17, and perhaps unreliable); the time of best visibility is not 21:15 BST (02:45 BST, 36deg alt due east in astro darkness for me). Where is this information from??????
Yes. I usually use Polaris as my first alignment star as it – very obligingly – drifts only very slowly without sidereal tracking engaged. Plus, as Polaris is a double star, one can straightaway suss out the optical performance of the telescope and atmospheric conditions too before completing alignment and engaging tracking.
Cheers Paul. It does sound like a fun project that could be written up for a short report in the Journal. Perhaps when I have some spare time, I’ll follow your advice and look into this a bit more.
