Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy)

I've only gotten back in Manila from the holidays and decided to take a shot at comet Lovejoy. I wasn't able to do it earlier since I left my usual gear (camera and travelscope) while away since we didn't have much space in the car. Comet C/2014 Q2 was first spotted by Terry Lovejoy last August.

Anyways, I decided to take out my dobsonian and scanned for the comet which is now in Eridanus. The moon and Manila's light and air pollution made it a bit challenging to observe the stars of Eridanus.

I was able to spot the comet by using omicron eridani (Keid & Beid) as my reference point. These stars were relatively bright and close enough to the comet's current position. I took multiple frames of the comet each at 1.3 seconds only given that my setup had no tracking capacity. Unfortunately I couldn't stack them together either since my laptop had limited memory to run conventional stacking softwares.



I ended up my night by taking a shot at Jupiter and the moon.




To aid you in searching for Comet Lovejoy, you can check out it's current position at TheSkyLive. Happy hunting! :)

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