There has been a lot of hype in the media about this comet, but it was never going to be really bright. I started to think about trying a photo as it approached its brightest, but the weather made this difficult. However I finally got the chance to try properly when the skies cleared yesterday.

This is a heavily processed image, made by adding 26 exposures each of 10 seconds, taken using my 500mm focal length f/4 (approximately) Skywatcher Startravel 102T telescope with a Nikon D3100 DSLR on an alt-az tracking mount. The camera was set to ISO 3200. The image stacking was done with DeepSkyStacker, followed by a little image processing there, then rather more adjustment using Gimp.
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In March last year I obtained a photo of the Orion nebula that I was quite pleased with, but later was a little frustrated that my old 3 inch (75mm) aperture refracting telescope was a bit wobbly on my new alt-az driven mount, as it’s so long. I have been trying an assortment of long photographic lenses, but this year took the plunge and got a compact 500mm focal length telescope with a 100mm objective lens.

I have finally been able to try it out in dark skies, and was first of all really pleased by the view of M42 through the eyepiece. A few days later I was able to get the camera on the end of the telescope, and the very first image on the back of the camera had me amazed. It was just a 20 second exposure, but showed so much.

The image above is a stacked composite of 8 images, total 160 seconds exposure, ISO 1600, using RAW format. I fiddled a bit with the contrast etc to get the result here, but I can see that I will have a lot of fun with this setup.