Comet Lulin

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Object: C2007 N3 (Lulin)

Type: Comet
Distance: 63 million km at time of imaging
Constellation: Virgo

Date: 21 February 2009
Equipment: SXV-H9, Vixen 114mm aperture f5.3 ED refractor
Subframes: 6 x 60 seconds, 16 flats/flat darks, calibrated and stacked in AIP4Win, tweaked in PSP7.

Look out of kitchen window at 6 pm. Clear, dark, star-studded skies. Don cold weather gear, enter garage, set up equipment and wheel down to observing platform.

Look up in trepidation, given recent weather. Still clear, dark, star-studded skies.

Polar align, set up 3-star align on SkySensor. Not a cloud in sight. Feed in comet orbital parameters to SkySensor and hit GoTo. Comet smack in centre of field. Spend a few minutes looking at it visually and have to admit to being slightly disappointed, having seen images of it and foolishly expecting to see same at eyepiece. I could not really discern a tail, nor any colour in the coma. But a mag 6 comet of any sort is still pretty special and a little spooky.

Remove eye-piece, fit CCD camera. Spend a couple of minutes focusing and another 10 minutes running the periodic error correction to make sure tracking was even. Mistake to faff about with PEC...

Blobs of cloud now starting to blow over. Set up 20 x 60 second exposures on lap-top and hope for best. No chance. Haze already apparent. Six frames later, solid cloud.

Curse luck. Cover equipment with tarp and leave out, hoping skies might clear. They don't. Give up at midnight, switch everything off and wheel back in.

And that was Comet Lulin, that was - for me, anyway. Solid cloud or haze for the next few weeks over my swampy corner of the UK meant I never saw it again. I salvaged what I could and the result is above - the haze gave an impossible gradient and background to the few subs that showed anything, but the core and a trace of coma can be seen.

Some folk had a bit more luck, as can be seen here...

The Cone Nebula...

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Object: NGC 2264 (cluster - Cone Nebula is at southern tip of cluster)
Type: Cluster with Nebula
Distance: 2500 light years
Constellation: Monoceros
Date: 24 January 2009
Equipment: SXV-H9, Zeiss 135mm telephoto lens at f3.5, ATIK manual filter wheel, Astronomix H-alpha, green and blue filters
Subframes: 20 x 300 seconds in H-alpha, 10 x 300 seconds in green and blue (unguided, 2x2 binned), 16 flats/flat darks, calibrated and stacked in AIP4Win, colour channels merged in PSP7

I've had several previous attempts at imaging this area, each suffering from poor tracking or poor atmospheric conditions, or both. Once again, my luck was out on this one.

This time, I decided to shoot red (H-alpha), green and blue channels in a 2, 1, 1 rotation, just in case the clouds rolled in and stranded me with half the set of subs needed for a colour image. Sure enough, the miserable run of cloudy skies this winter relented only for a couple of hours before a high haze set in once more.

And once more, my tracking was a tad out, meaning I had to hit the frames with a deconvolution filter to round up the slight trailing on the stars. This leaves dark circles around the brighter stars and also costs some image detail. The Cone Nebula itself stands out quite nicely though, and the extent of nebulosity in the area surrounding the 'Christmas Tree Cluster' can clearly be seen, even if some of the detail is missing.

Still, I'll take what I can get given the weather. Lack of sunspots and cloud nucleation? Global warming meaning more haze at high latitudes?

Or just bloody British weather? It's all very frustrating...