[BAA Comets] C/2014 Q2 animation 2015-01-24

[Andrew Robertson]

An excellent image as always Nick.  Coincided with what will probably be my last decent view of it on Saturday ( weather and moon starting to get in the way.) Through the 28 x 110 bins it was quite greenish with an obvious but tenuous tail extending some distance. Through the 600mm Dob the coma was very large indeed with a tiny stellar core but not as greenish. I could follow the tail through two or three FOV's - hard to define where it ended.

Re the 6 hour sequence mentioned below. As the BAA has quite adequate funds, is there not a case for sections to have a budget that they can use occasionally for something like that? I wouldn't suggest the BAA continually funded image after image which would be a repeat of something members can do, but an occasional, specialised one off?

Andrew

-----Original Message-----
From: Comets-disc [mailto:comets-disc-bounces at britastro.org] On Behalf Of Nick James
Sent: 25 January 2015 09:27
To: BAA Comets discussion list
Subject: [BAA Comets] C/2014 Q2 animation 2015-01-24

I managed another long animation of C/2014 Q2 last night from 1834 through to 2304. The timelapse consists of 13 frames, each of which is 10x120s offset on the comet's motion. The field of view is 2.3 x 1.1 deg, N up. Not much is going on though:

http://www.nickdjames.com/Comets/2015/2014q2_20150124_ndj.gif

I have a data processing pipeline for this which is now almost completely automatic. Image calibration and stacking is done with existing scripts  but alignment, background normalisation and stacking is done with an auto-generated IRIS script which you can see here if you are interested:

http://www.nickdjames.com/Comets/2015/proc.pgm

It's not quite right yet since, as you can see from the sequence, a change in transparency makes the coma diameter change through the animation. This should be fairly simple to fix...

If anyone wants to spend a few hundred dollars on a 6hr sequence of images of this comet using the widefield itelescope system in New Mexico I'd be happy to process the sequence. It would be a spectacular timelapse!

Nick.
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