Comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy sighting
Posted by Wesley on
Comet C/2014 Q2 (fuzzy ball near center) and 60 Eridani (bottom right), 50% size
Australian amateur astronomer Lovejoy's 5th comet, C/2014 Q2, is coming closest to Earth on January 7, 2015, and it has been getting brighter in the recent weeks. On a clear dark sky, it's currently bright enough to be seen with a pair of binoculars, as its magnitude is around 5. The sky at Naju cleared up last Friday night, so I went out to take some photos of this comet.
When I took the photos, the comet was near 60 Eridani, a 5.0 magnitude star in the constellation Eridanus, which made it easier to position the camera by hand. You can see the C/2014 Q2 as a fuzzy, slightly green ball here. The faint star above the comet is TYC 5899-440-1, a 9.6 magnitude star. The faintest stars in the photo are around magnitude 10.0.
This was the first time I used my Canon EOS 450D DSLR to take celestial photos since the Venus transit of 2012. The job was relegated to SX50 HS in 2013, but unless I'm taking photos of the planets or satellites, I felt that the larger sensor would work better, so I took the 450D out of storage for this session. It seems to have paid off. I had to resort to a relatively short (2.5 seconds) exposure because I didn't use the star tracker this time, but I still had good results.
Device: Canon EOS 450D + Tamron 18-270mm Di II VC PZD
Settings: 394mm - ISO 1600 - 2.5s - f/6.3
Filters: None
Time: 2015-01-02 22:48-22:51 KST
Location: Naju, Korea
14 photos stacked with RegiStax 6.1.0.8