Observation by Nick James: C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)

Uploaded by

Nick James

Observer

Nick James

Observed

2020 Jul 07 - 00:25

Uploaded

2020 Jul 09 - 22:43

Objects

C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)

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Constellation

Auriga

Field centre

RA: 06^h18^m
Dec: +37°10'
Position angle: -19°18'

Field size

6°39' × 4°34'

Equipment

Canon EOS550D, 200mm, f/2.8 Lens

Exposure

4x5.2s

Location

Chelmsford, UK

Target name

C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)

Title

C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)

About this image

To get a good NE horizon I cycled to a large field around 10 minutes away with all my gear in a rucksack. I had a Canon EOS550D with my trusty 200mm f/2.8L lens and a Star Adventurer drive on a small tripod. This is a stack of four 5.2s frames which have been dark subtracted and contrast stretched. The comet was a fabulous sight in 8x40 binoculars. A timelapse of all the frames taken on that morning is here.

Files associated with this observation

2020f3_20200707_0125_ndjs.jpg (1.2 MB)

Like this image

Chris Dole, Bill Leatherbarrow, Ray Emery, Nick Quinn, Nick Hewitt, Mr Leonard Entwisle, Alan Thomas, Jeremy Shears, Mr Michael Alan Frost, Martin Lewis, Philip Masding, Nik Szymanek, Peter Goodhew FRAS, Peter Carson, Andy Wilson

Comments

Martin Lewis, 2020 Jul 10 - 14:30 UTC

That's a really beautiful time-lapse Nick.

Can you give us some details on the frames and processing for it?

Best wishes
Martin

Nick James, 2020 Jul 10 - 17:53 UTC

Thanks Martin.

The source data is 232 frames of 5.2s each taken with a Canon EOS550D and a 200mm, f/2.8L lens on a Star Advenurer mount. In the original movie I used half size JPEG frames, stretched them and ran them together as a movie using ffmpeg. I have now replaced that with a movie based on the raw (CR2) frames. Each raw frame was converted to a 16-bit TIFF using dcraw with a suitable averaged dark frame. The TIFF frames were scaled to 50% and stretched using Imagemagick convert and then assembled into a movie using ffmpeg. All of those are command line tools which script nicely so I didn't have to do this on all 232 frames. The movie looks particularly nice when played on a big flat panel TV.

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