Everyone seems to be taking shots at Lulin at the moment but I haven’t had a clear night for weeks.  Sunday was my first opportunity to take a look at the green comet and  even though Starry Night showed it as being behind my house until after 11pm, it actually appeared in the gap between my house and the neighbours so I was able to image a little earlier than expected.

As the comet is moving quickly against the background I kept exposures to 20 seconds, which in hindsight was not long enough. I’ve spent hours trying to extract as much detail as I can from the 49 frames I took, but my best image is a stack of only 24.

Taken with the usual setup, 1200mm fl 254mm newtonian scope on EQ6 mount. Starry Night, EQMOD, Canon 300D (unmodded). Guided with 70mm cheapo scope using QHY5 guide camera.

As a footnote, I must try and get the Atik 16ic configured as my guider.  The QHY5 is so unreliable, both Guidemaster and PHD crash when using it. I have found that if I leave PHD with the error message on the screen it continues to guide regardless

In the same session I also managed to get a few 3 minute guided frames of M51.  I’ve not been able to get more than 1 minute subs previously, but the guider worked for most of the session, so I’ve been able to stack 20 frames to make this image:

It’s nice to have a colour camera to get these galaxy shots but I think I need to go longer than 3 minutes! Coma is very obvious even in this heavily cropped image – I think I may need to invest in a coma corrector next.