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Comet NEAT Q4/2001 on May 16, 2004 Location:
Texas Star Party 2004 near Ft. Davis, Texas Other info: Yes,
a single one minute exposure! Nothing beats
dark skies! Because this shot gave the depth I
was looking for, I decided not to add additional exposures
since the comet moved too much during this time. I
would have added color information, but this was first
light with the new SBIG STL-6303E and I didn't have
the filter wheel setup correctly. This comet was found by the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking program (NEAT) in 2001. What follows is a series of photographs showing it's progress toward our northern skies. Early estimates of this comet were for it to appear as a magnitude 1 comet in early May and slowly dim as it climbs the sky toward the north. The projections were a bit optimistic as the comet topped out around magnitude 3 and the tail hasn't shown itself to be all that extended as the images below demonstrate. But it's still a beautiful site!
Comet NEAT Q4/2001 on May 9, 2004 Location:
Ballauer Observatory near Azle, Texas Other info: In
order to bring out and stabilize the foreground because
of the moving stars, I opened the last image of the
stack and copied and pasted it as a new layer in Photoshop
over the entire stack. I then chose "lighten"
for the blending mode. The result keeps the star
images the same while improving the foreground.
Comet NEAT Q4/2001 on May 7, 2004 Location:
Dark country out near Paradise, Texas. Other info: In
order to bring out and stabilize the foreground because
of the moving stars, I opened the last image of the
stack and copied and pasted it as a new layer in Photoshop
over the entire stack. I then chose "lighten"
for the blending mode. The result keeps the star
images the same while improving the foreground.
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