Tag: gif

Comet C/2020 T2 (Palomar) moving through the constellation Bootes on the night of June 15, 2021. The animation covers a period of approximately 45 minutes. At the time these images were captured, the comet was moving across the sky at approximately 4 arcminutes per hour. The field of view is 13×10 arcminutes. North is up. East is left. More details below.

Comet C/2020 T2 (Palomar) was in the southwestern sky in June.  I was able to image it late in the evening of June 15th and into the early morning of June 16th.

This animated image shows C/2020 T2 Palomar as it crawled through a rather barren area in the constellation Bootes southwest of the bright star Arcturus.

If you notice a slight brightening of the background in the lower right quarter of the animation (southwest quadrant), you are seeing noise creep into the telescope’s field of view from a nearby crescent moon.  When these images were taken, the Moon was only five fist widths (50 degrees) southwest of the comet.  

During this pass through the inner solar system, C/2020 T2 (Palomar) isn’t showing a tail. All we can see of the comet is its coma, the diffuse cloud of gas and dust that enshrouds its tiny nucleus and keeps it hidden from view.

At the time of this image, the night of June 15-16, the comet’s brightness was being reported by various observers around the world as magnitude 10.5. This is approximately sixty times fainter than a bare eyeball can see from an extremely dark observing location.

Comet C/2020 T2 (Palomar) made its closest approach to Earth on May 12th, and will reach perihelion, closest approach to the Sun, on July 11th. After passing perihelion, the comet will recede from the Sun out into more distant areas of the solar system, well past the orbit of Pluto.

Note:

This animated sequence was captured with a Celestron C8 telescope (203mm f/10) and  F0.63 focal reducer, using a ZWO ASI224MC camera. Each of the eight images in the sequence is made up of a stack 10-23 sub-images, each exposed for 20-30 seconds.  The sequence was captured, live-stacked, and live-processed using SharpCap. The animation was created using GIMP.

 

 

This animated GIF of Comet C/2020 M3 (ATLAS) consists of a sequence of six images aligned and overlaid one on top of the other. Each image is made up of a stack of eleven 10-second subimages. The 40-minute sequence was taken on December 27, 2020, between 02:49-03:31 UT with an 8” Celestron SCT (203mm f/10) operating at f/5 and a ZWO ASI224MC CMOS camera. The field of view is 17×12 arcminutes (0.28×0.20 degrees). North is up. East is left. You can see a full-size version of this animation here.

Although I had just observed and imaged Comet C/2020 M3 (ATLAS) seven days earlier, I was drawn back to it again. At first I thought it was because the moon was high and bright in the sky washing out faint galaxies and nebulae and making them unsuitable targets for the evening’s observing session. I also thought it was because the wind was really gusting, buffeting the telescope and making long camera exposures impossible. In retrospect, I realize it was because I was fascinated by watching the live images build on my screen showing this small fuzzy visitor in real time as it silently moved against the background of stars in the constellation Auriga back to its realm in outer solar system.

Comet C/2020 M3 (ATLAS) won’t be back this way for 139 years.  Its elongated elliptical orbit takes it out to 27 astronomical units from the Sun, or just inside the orbit of the planet Neptune, which orbits at 30 astronomical units (2.8 billion miles or 4.5 billion km).  At the time this animation sequence was captured, the comet was 50 million miles (81 million km) from Earth.

This animation shows Comet C/2020 M3 (ATLAS) at magnitude 13.0 (measured in the green channel), considerably dimmer than the magnitude 11.8 I measured seven days earlier.  As Comet ATLAS continues to recede from us on its run back to the deep reaches of the solar system it will continue to fade.  Soon, it will only be visible to the largest telescopes as a faint dot.