Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)

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.

Comet 2022 E3

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.

The heavy processing brings up the faint coma around the comet nucleus, with the beginnings of its tail, but actually hides the fact that during the approximately 15 minutes needed to take the images, the comet moved in the sky relative to the background stars. This is easily seen in the same image with less processing:

Comet E3 with less processing

The comet is now getting further from the Sun and the Earth daily, and is gradually becoming fainter and smaller.

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