Comet A6 Lemmon from the city on Sunday
Photo by Matthew Ryno
Scope / Lens
Vixen AX103S
Camera
ZWO ASI2600MC Pro
Description
If you couldn't get out to darker skies, Comet c/2025 A6 Lemmon has been a decent binocular target from the city - although very tough for non-binoculars users to find without a steadied telescope or binocular mount. It was also low in the horizon after sunset, so if you're in the city, that means looking through light pollution from the city, and in my case under a street light and beside some yard lights.On Sunday it was clear, but in doing my regular weekend routine, I couldn't really take a lot of time to travel to darker skies, so I stuck around to capture this below. I then processed this during the epic 18-inning Dodgers / Blue Jays game the next day after taking calibration frames for the times/temps.
This is a very short stack of about 25 x 60 second exposures, aligned on the comet. In this case, I opted to just track the comet and beat some incoming clouds, so those lines you see streaking are stars as the comet moves for 30 minutes of time as I collected photons. It sometimes gives a sense of the motion to do it this way. Focal length was 593mm in this shot from my Vixen refractor, which captured some of that tail as the solar wind whips into the tail and causes it to drift a bit.
Light pollution couldn't quite get removed despite a herculean effort in PixInsight. Gradient removal tools and DBE were my friends in processing.
See you in 1,150 years comet, farewell!
ID: 1635