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...