Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) begins to fade

Last Wednesday evening (8th February 2023) we had some more clear weather before the waning gibbous Moon rose at 19:58 UT. The seasons are moving on now and astronomical twilight lasts until nearly 19:00 UT. Comet C/2022 E3 is now beginning to fade and is moving fast across the sky. On the 8th it was in the constellation of Auriga not far from iota Aurigae and the border with Perseus and Taurus. COBS indicates that it was about 6th magnitude. I again set up my Celestron 102SLT on the HEQ-5 mount but I found setting up was more complicated this time because I lost power to the drive momentarily whilst doing the sky alignment. Anyway, I managed 26x30s frames of the comet (ISO 3200) before I accidentally nudged the tripod. Here is one such frame taken at 19:00 UT (binned x2 and modified in Photoshop using levels):-

I then combined all 26 frames in DeepSkyStacker (comet stacking, star trails, auto adaptive weighted average). The resulting frame was then modified in Photoshop using curves and levels, binned x2 and then cropped slightly. This was the result:-

The green colour of the comet's coma is nicely seen. The dust tail is obvious but the ion tail was too faint to be seen here. The first frame was taken at 18:51 UT and the last at 19:09. I think the flattening of the image to remove vignetting of the telescope went slightly better this time as I took some flats about sunset. Basically these are out of focus shots of clear patches of blue sky.

All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2023