Panstarrs 10 frame animation, played slowly on Youtube, from last Sunday

Here's a link to a quick draft animation of Comet Panstarrs technically of course it's Panstarrs 2011 L4.

This video is just ten frames.  I didn't take a camera controller setup to take longer photo sequences and for a while was taking 4 shot sequences not realizing I didn't reprogram the CANON EOS to take 10 shots instead.

These shots are 4 seconds each, so if we advanced the playback of each frame at 4 seconds per frame we can see how fast the comet is moving in real time.   The comet looks like it's barely moving of course when it's zoomed out to the wider framing of the image capture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EPLWTHAz7U&feature=youtu.be

I did a zoom in but this zoom was zooming in on a wide frame capture of the slidehow, so it's not as high a resolution had I cropped the original images and zoomed them in and played it back at different cropped resolutions.   The zoom suffers from having a base resolution of the screen resolution of playback.

I may create a better resolution movie later.   Also I probably didn't chose the right keyframe rate for the rendering in Screen flow so at times the image is blurry as the "keyframe" should be a new frame from a new scene.  They don't line up so the compression for the movie sometimes messes up the image and you'll see pixelation.

This gives you a rough idea how the comet moved.

It's not as bright and is visible to a person using binoculars, but difficult for some to see naked eye.  Especially in brighter skies or when the sky is not dark enough.

This kind of comet is kind of difficult to find sometimes.  It's a target that can be found easier if you have a few friends or even a half a dozen people looking for it wtih binoculars and wide field telescopes.   That gives you a chance to have someone find it.

Better of course if you have a tripod as well to fix the telescope or binocular that finds it so you can figure out where it is.   Ken found it first, but was using a binocular on a monopod and it seemed so bright to him that he could see it naked eye when he took the binocular away.  When he moved however he lost it.  Make sure you locate some kind of land mark and not move to far or get to excited when you first spot it until other friends can see it and get good frame of reference to see the comet.