Comet Panstarrs 04-10-2013 Hector J Robinson Observatory, Lincoln Park, Michigan
3.2 second photo, at 1600 iso on Meade 480mm refractor. Processed with Nebulosity, Preview, Neat Image Pro. JPEG output size reduced for Blog posting.
I played around a bit with Nebulosity, then filtered the results. This with with one photo. There were no darks or flats processed. The biggest problem is the Sky glow and the tail are so close to each other in the color space, it's really hard to bring out the details of the tail.
Maybe with curves and photoshop I could do better, but I haven't tried that yet. I ended up desaturating the colors to try to show more detail in the tail and did a few tricks (mostly pushing buttons on a few different settings) with Nebulosity until things looked a little better.
I'm not very happy with this image, because it really doesn't show enough detail. I filtered the image, but of course there is a bit of fall off to the edges which darken a bit in this picture.
I tried some radical settings as well to see how much tail detail could be found from the image, but those images look like reverse color photos and have little value. Perhaps in some kind of layer they could be used to bring in detail. Sometimes processors treat different layers often color layers and luminance layers separately and then recombine them mapping detail from the luminance layer back in. I wasn't using techniques that advanced with this.
Perhaps I'll get a better shot of the comet under a darker sky condition showing more tail detail in the near future.
One of the hassles was the telescopes were not focused for the camera, so I had to keep trying to refocus them, without slewing to another object. When it's getting bright out, that will slow a person down.
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