By Hassan Dadashi . arani | 2023-02-04
![Community photo entitled by Ernest Jacobs on 02/01/2023 at North Java, NY, USA](https://earthsky.org/upl/gravity_forms/6-d184048789a60d766a02a8e43117298b/2023/02/C-2022E3ZTF-PI2a-NoSR-02012023.jpg)
On 02/01/2023 09:00 pm by Ernest Jacobs| North Java, NY, USA
Didn't think I was going to catch this one due to the poor weather (seemingly non-stop clouds night after night). This comet won't be back for another 50,000 years, so missing out on it would have been disappointing. The forecast indicated there would be a brief window of clear skies Wednesday night, so I headed out to our club's observatory. The forecast was accurate. We had a window of about an hour and a half to view and image the comet. This is the first opportunity for me to try out my new Dedicated Astronomy Camera (First Light) and it did not disappoint.
Captured on 2/1/2023 at the Buffalo Astronomical Association's Beaver Meadow Observatory. The club's NP-101is Telescope and Astro Physics AP1200 mount were used with my brand new ZWO ASI2600MC Pro camera. It was first light for this camera. The image is comprised of 60 subs at 60 sec each (1 hour total) at Gain 100. The capture software was NINA.
Post Processing was done in PixInsight. The individual images were stacked using WBPP to give me a Star Aligned image. The stars were extracted to be combined with the Comet image. RC-Astro's StarXTerminator plug-in was used in Batch Mode to remove the stars from the individual star aligned frames. The resulting Starless comet images were Comet Aligned and Stacked. The Stars image and the Starless Comet image were combined using Pixel Math once both were fully processed.