Order by: Trending (past 30 days)Date
Community photo entitled  by Nathan Eaton Jr on 04/08/2024 at Ellis County, Texas, USA

On 04/08/2024 01:42 pm by Nathan Eaton Jr| Ellis County, Texas, USA

I was excited to see an article in my news feed describing a comet passing close enough to the sun to fit in a telescopic field of view. Called SOHO-5008, it was a sungrazer, a comet passing so close to the Sun it would appear in coronagraph images by the SOHO solar satellite. This one had been identified in SOHO images the morning of the eclipse and several people found that they had captured it in their eclipse images. Later that day, it had burned up in the Sun.

I pulled up my own images from totality and found that I had captured it, too! It took bumping up the exposure far more than I usually would but, once I did that and made a few other adjustments to bring out more detail, there it was. Here is an edit with labels, noting some of the brighter stars visible from constellation Pisces and adding an enlarged inset for the comet.

Sky Watcher Evostar 72ED with 0.85 Focal Reducer/Flattener
Deepsky Dad AF3 Autofocuser
Nikon D750
Sky Watcher Star Adventurer GTi
2012 15" MacBook Pro running Mojave and Solar Eclipse Maestro controlling imaging

Blend of 14 images from 1/4000 to 1" at 1 stop intervals, loaded as layers in Photoshop
Layers converted to smart object with Mean stacking
Additional adjustments to exposure, contrast, shadows, clarity and texture using Adobe Camera Raw filter, primarily increasing exposure to +4EV to bring out the comet
Labels added with Photoshop