Saturday night (the 21st January), after attending a BAA meeting in London, we had some clear but cold weather in the evening. Comet C/2022 E3 had by this date moved further north and just crossed over the border of the constellation of Bootes into Draco. It is now becoming easier to see before midnight and hangs in the sky below the north celestial pole. I took this picture just after 11pm GMT:-
I used my Nikon D90 to take 24 exposures of 10 seconds each. The lens was set at 105mm and the ISO at 6400. The exposures were combined in DeepSkyStacker and the resulting frame was stretched using curves in Photoshop, binned x2 and then cropped. Barrel-distortion and vignetting were removed by using PTLens. The field seen here is approximately 9x6 degrees. North is towards the top left-hand corner of the frame, East towards the top right-hand corner. The first frame was taken at 23:02 and the last at 23:08 UT.
The comet can be seen as a greenish smudge in the lower part of the frame. The tail extends in a north-easterly direction. There are some 6th magnitude stars nearby and the comet doesn't seem to be brighter than these.
All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2023
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