Date Time: October 5, 2019 2100-0130hrs
Weather: Clear, no wind, very cool, -1C, 72% humidity.
Equipment: Canadian Telescopes 80 ED/APO f/6.25 telescope on tracking mount, 32mm eyepiece. Canon Rebel T3 with 18-55mm lens, 75-300mm lens and attached to telescope at prime focus. Images stacked with DeepSkyStacker and processed on PhotoShop.
Attendance: David McCashion
Objective: To locate, view and image two comets high in the southern sky, after the first quarter moon drops out of sight over the horizon, after 2300hrs.
Report:
- Nice Conjunction of the first quarter Moon and Saturn tonight. Very close together. By 2330hrs, the conjunction was very low and Moon was turning red.
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| Single shot, 1/40 second, ISO 200. Camera using telescope at prime focus. |
- Moon didnt get low enough to start searching for comets till after 2330hrs. At this point I started with imaging M2 in Aquarius. A very bright globular cluster in the same constellation as one of my target comets, Africano.
8-45 second images stacked. ISO 6400 - At around midnight, started searching for Comet Africano, which was supposed to be in Aquarius. This constellation is a faint one, and even with very dark skies, it was challenging matching heavens above star chart with what's visible in the sky. After imaging all over the patch of sky where comet was reported to be, could not locate Comet. One image had what could be a comet, but was so faint as to not be confirmable. Comet may have faded drastically, or I simply was misreading the heavens-above star chart.
- At approximately 0130hrs, decided to try to image the western Veil Nebula or NGC 6960, in Cygnus. Could see the long, stringy nebula though camera viewfinder. Very long, but faint, cloud like. Found processing this image to be very difficult. Nebula just didn't seem to want to pop out.
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| 17-45second images stacked. ISO 6400 |
- Seen multiple shooting stars with one leaving a smoke trail. No satellites observed
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