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This rich and colorful region shows incredible saturation and detail.
Blue and yellow reflection nebulae reflect the colors of the bright nearby stars.
IC 4592 2 panel mosaic. This was challenging to put together, and I left in some background color. Light view emphasizes millions of stars in field.
Dark dust clouds together with bright reflection nebulae make a colorful scene.
IC4604, IC 4605, IC 4603, NGC 6121, NGC 6144
M4 globular cluster, Antares
C/2017 K2 (PanSTARRS) is visible at bottom left as a green spot
Telescope live
4 hours LRGB exposure first panel.
2.6 hours LRGB exposure second panel.
Total 6.6 hours.
Nikon 200 mm f/2 lens
8/2022
Credits: Eric Ganz / Telescope Live
Pixinsight, Lightroom
FLI ML16200
El Sauce Observatory
Río Hurtado, Coquimbo Region, Chile
©2022 Marsha Kirschbaum
Comet C/2017 K2 (PANSTARRS) in Scorpius, passing the Rho Ophiuchi region, with a bonus meteor trail on 18 Aug. 2022, from the Goose Pond Fish & Wildlife Area in Greene County, Indiana.
Wide-field: Nikon D850 DSLR, Rokinon 85mm f/1.4 lens, 32 frames, each 2 min., f/4, ISO 800, tracked with an iOptron SkyGuider Pro. Combined in Astro Pixel Processor and post-processed in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. Meteor masked and layered into the composite from one frame.
Comet detail: Explore Scientific ED102 FCD-100 107mm f/7 Apochromat, ZWO ASI294MC Pro cooled, one-shot, CMOS camera, iOptron CEM25P mount, ZWO ASIAir Pro controller, auto-guided, UV/IR cut filter. 12 frames, 5 min. each, gain 150, -10ºC. Combined in Astro Pixel Processor with flats and darks; combined twice: registered on the stars, and separately registered on the comet. Post-processed in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.
Comet C/2017 K2 (PANSTARRS) in the Constellation Ophiuchus, as seen from Skaggs Springs Road around 1am on July 24th, 2022, ten days after its closest approach to Earth.
The field of view of the picture is about 5.5 by 5.5 degrees. To the naked eye the comet was completely invisible, and I aimed the camera at what looked to me like an empty spot in the sky. The brighter star next to the comet's head is HD 150017, with visual magnitude 7.5. The faintest stars in the photo have magnitude 15 or 16.
This is a tracked shot with 16 minutes total exposure time. 32 frames were stacked twice, with alignment relative to the stars and the comet respectively.
On the night of 15th / 16th July 2022 comet C/2017 K2 (PANSTARRS) was at its closest conjunction with the globular cluster Messier 10 so I had to get out there and image it.
William Optics 70mm refractor and Canon 1100D on an EQ5 mount on a permanent pier. The mount was tracking at sidereal rate. M10 is in Ophiuchus and it drops behind trees from the pier quite early, so I had to start imaging while it was still twilight. I shot more frames than I stacked but tried to only stack the best.
90 x 30 seconds at ISO-1600 stacked with 15 darks using Deep Sky Stacker. I did several versions of the stack, but this version was the best. It is only stacked on the stars so the comet is slight smeared because it had moved a bit during this session.
Processing was done in Photoshop, Lightroom and Fast Stone Image Viewer.
It's a long period comet that was discovered in May 2017 at a distance of around 16 AU from the sun. It comes from Oort cloud and its next perihelion will be on 19 December this year. Although the comet is still coming to the sun, its visibility from the Czech Republic will be decreasing in the next months, because the comet is still getting closer to the horizon and in autumn it will be visible only from the southern hemisphere.
This picture I took on the 27th of June. Unfortunately, my battery died during the capturing and I didn't notice that so I managed only 48 minutes of data. So I know the result isn't good, but if I don't publish it I will feel sorry.
Anyway, on 15th July, the comet will be closest to the star cluster M10, so don't miss this opportunity. I hope, I will capture it too.
Canon EOS 760D, Sigma 135mm f/2.8
EXIF: 24x120", f/5.6, ISO 400
27/06/2022 (1:20 am-2:10 am), Liberec, Czech Republic (Bortle 7)
Comet C/2017 K2 (PanSTARRS). It has been a couple of years since we last imaged a comet and this one is well-placed in the southern sky at the moment and, with a magnitude of 7.33 (according to Stellarium), is bright enough to be found fairly easily. At the time of shooting, the comet was 1.811 AU (270,900,000 km) from Earth. We experimented with different exposures before settling on 3 minutes but a few shots at different exposures were thrown into the mix. The image is a composite of the same data processed twice, once for the comet and once for the stars.
[From Wikipedia] C/2017 K2 (PanSTARRS) is an Oort cloud comet with an inbound hyperbolic orbit, discovered in May 2017 at a distance beyond the orbit of Saturn when it was 16 AU (2.4 billion km) from the Sun. As of June 2022, the 3-sigma uncertainty in the current distance of the comet from the Sun is ±5000 km. The comet is record-breaking because it is already becoming active at such a distance. Only comet Hale–Bopp produced such a show from that distance with a similar nucleus. However, this comet will not be as visible as Hale–Bopp was in 1997 in part because it does not come nearly as close to the Sun. Astronomers had never seen an active inbound comet this far out, where sunlight is 1/225th its brightness as seen from Earth. Temperatures, correspondingly, are at -440 °F (-262 °C) in the Oort cloud. However, as it was approaching the Sun at a distance of 16 AU at discovery, a mix of ancient ices on the surface containing oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide began to sublimate and shed as dust. This material expands into a vast 130,000 km (81,000 mi) wide halo of dust, called a coma, enveloping the solid nucleus.
Research with the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) infers the comet nucleus to have a radius between 14–80 km (9–50 mi), so there is a chance the nucleus could be as large as C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp). However, research with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) estimates the nucleus to have a circular equivalent diameter of less than 18 km (11 mi). On 17 September 2020, morphological studies of the inner coma, observed on 12 September 2020, were reported, noting that two jet-streamed structure were emitted from the nucleus and, as well, that the length of the tail was about 800,000 km (500,000 mi) long.
The comet was within 5 AU (750 million km) of Earth by 11 January 2022. Around 6 July 2022, the comet will cross the celestial equator, and then on 14 July 2022, it will pass 1.8 AU (270 million km) from Earth and shine around 9.0 magnitude making it a decent binoculars object. It will reach perihelion on 19 December 2022, close to the orbit of Mars, and should not be visible to naked eye at 8.0 magnitude.
On 27 July 2021, further detailed observations of the comet were reported on The Astronomer's Telegram.
JPL Horizons models that C/2017 K2 took millions of years to come from the Oort cloud at a distance of roughly 50,000 AU (0.8 ly). The heliocentric orbital eccentricity drops below 1 in December 2023. The outbound orbital period will be around 18000 years.
10/07/2022
002 x 300-second exposures at Unity Gain (139) cooled to -10°C
001 x 120-second exposures at Unity Gain (139) cooled to -10°C
012 x 180-second exposures at Unity Gain (139) cooled to -10°C
075 x dark frames
020 x flat frames
100 x bias frames
Binning 1x1
Total integration time = 48 minutes
Captured with APT
Guided with PHD2
Processed in Nebulosity and Photoshop
Equipment:
Telescope: Sky-Watcher Explorer-150PDS
Mount: Skywatcher EQ5
Guide Scope: Orion 50mm Mini
Guiding Camera: Zwo ASI 120 MC and SVBONY SV105 with ZWO USBST4 guider adapter
Imaging Camera: ZWO ASI1600MC Pro with anti-dew heater
Baader Mark-III MPCC Coma Corrector
Filter: Light Pollution filter and Optolong L-Pro
Exposición de 1 minuto y de 2,5 minutos, con reflector SW de 15 cm F5 y cámara Dsi3 en foco primario, desde cielo urbano, Rosario SF. Argentina.
Exposición de 31 minutos, con reflector SW de 15 cm F5 y cámara Dsi3 en foco primario, desde cielo urbano, Rosario SF. Argentina.
Comet C/2017 K2 (PanSTARRS) continues to brighten but is still quite faint, though positioned fairly high in the sky overnight. It will likely get somewhat brighter as it approaches closest to Earth in July. Last night the comet appeared near the loose open cluster IC 4665 in the constellation Ophiucus as our streak of clear nights continues.
10 3-minute exposures, Explore Scientific ED102 102mm f/7 refractor, ZWO ASI294MC camera, UV/IR cutoff filter, iOptron CEM25P mount, ASIAir controller. Processed in Astro Pixel Processor, Lightroom, and Photoshop.
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows a fuzzy cloud of dust, called a coma, surrounding the comet C/2017 K2 PANSTARRS (K2), the farthest active comet ever observed entering the solar system. Hubble snapped images of K2 when the frozen visitor was over 2.4 billion kilometres from the Sun, just beyond Saturn's orbit. Even at that remote distance, sunlight is warming the frigid comet, producing a 128,000-kilometre-wide coma that envelops a tiny, solid nucleus. K2 has been traveling for millions of years from its home in the Oort Cloud, a spherical region at the edge of our solar system. This frigid area contains hundreds of billions of comets, the icy leftovers from the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. The image was taken in June 2017 by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3.
More information: www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo1740a/
Credit:
NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA)