Astrophotography: Comet Lovejoy C/2014 Q2

There are those vivid memories of childhood that are just as clear as they happened yesterday.    I have one of those memories from growing up that I think it part of the reason I love space.  I was a kid and my dad took me out on a night adventure.  We had a creek that ran through the farm and once a year these large sucker fish would would swim upstream to spawn.  We would put on waders, walk up the creek with our flashlight and go fish gigging.   That was fun, but that one spring as we finished gigging and came out into the open field a large comet was visible in the sky.  I remember it being spectacular.  The tail took up almost half the sky.   Halley's comet had come when I was in second grade and I don't really remember it.   So this was my first experience with seeing a comet.  I don't even remember which comet it was, but it was stunning.   I had never seen something so beautiful in the night sky before.

Years passed and just recently I was so ready to see comet ISON when it got all its hype as the "comet of the century."  Yet that one basically disintegrated as it made it trip around the sun in 2013.  So then out of the blue, I was seeing amateur astronomers taking pictures of Comet Lovejoy C/2014 Q2 last year.  The comet gets is name from Terry Lovejoy who is the guy that found the comet.   By the way, he has discovered five comets so far that are all named after him.

I had to try my luck at getting a picture.  This comet was not going to be like the oneI saw as a kid and take up much of the night sky.  However, with a telescope some very nice pictures were taken.  I never got a spectacular picture, but I was happy I did get something.  It is the first comet I had ever tracked in the night sky with my telescope and so far the only one I have taken a picture of.   Comets are a little tricky since the the they are moving differently than other deep sky objects.  The basic process is still the same.  I take multiple exposures of the comet as I track it and then stack all those pictures together to get one final photo.  I processed the data two ways.  In the first processing the comet itself is the focus and the stars are blurred.  Each frame the comet had moved so much that the stars are in different locations and so while the comet is stacked together the stars are not which is why the stars form streaks in the picture.  .  The second processing took into account the comet location and star location in each frame and stacked them together in the same locations.  The software that does this did a really nice job, but it was still time consuming since i had to manually mark the comet's nucleus in each frame to give the software a frame of reference.

Processing taking into account just the comet location

Processing taking into account comet and star location 

Comet Lovejo C/2014 Q2 ended up giveing a very nice tail.  My pictures only show a hint of what is really there.  Take a look at some of the professionals to really see the beauty of this comet when it was visiting.  It gave off a green/blue light as the sun heated it up.  There were at least 21 organic molecules coming off the comet in gas form including sugar and ethanol!

Hopefully another comet will come visit us in the near future, but this one won't be back for 8000 years!  No one on Earth will see this one again for quite some time.