My all night photo session on Grosse Ille - comet Ison

I setup my telescope, a nexstar 4se and my old home build f4 four once telescope to try to take an image of comet Ison.

Clouds through the evening looked discouraging with some breaks and clearing at times. I had my car next to my imaging setup and tested the camera and telescope on m42 and the moon while waiting, checking tracking.

With a wide field telescope for a comet tracking might not have mattered as much. The telescope was tracking very well, but my searching for the comet would rely on my iPad sky safari software controlling the telescope, as the comet was not defined inside the telescope controller.

I used skyfi a wireless control box that sets up it's own wifi network to control the nexstar mount with my iPad. Testing it there times before I arrived earlier worked without problems. When out at the river I could nit get my iPad to connect to the wifi network.

I sat much of the time in my car warming up as cold winds off the lake really chilled me. I felt at times I was standing in the cold in swimming trunks instead of with long johns and winter clothing. Clearly I should have worn winter snow pants.

I have a theory that my Prius hybrid motor running caused rf interference or magnetic interference to mess with my iPad and the skyfi remote. Perhaps it was the cold weather on the skyfi box as well. Whatever the case I could not get the remote to work and control and point the telescope. It worked briefly but died just before I was to slew to the comet.

I had my vixen BT 80 binocular telescope out and used that to manually find the comet. I could not locate the comet with the Celestron mount using the hand controller, even with a four degree field of view.

I ended up taking some photos of the comet using a fixed tripod Amd the camera lens on the canon EOS t1i. I took some ling exposures to find the comet, and see if I could see it with images on the laptop. But also some four second exposures at 3200 iso and as wide an aperture as possible to get some kind of wide field shot of the comet.

Ison looked like a huge green fuzzy star through thin clouds and haze and the tail was visible clearly through the bt80 binoculars and my 10 by 50 binoculars. Clouds moved over and obscured the view as I was viewing the comet. I setup backyard EOS to take up to 30 photos in a sequence and took many photos hoping to get a decent one to show others.

Below is one of the photos.

Processed in deep sky stacker to remove a single dark frame from the single four second exposure, photoshop and Neat Image Pro noise reduction.

You can see there are a couple of aircraft leaving jet trails in the photo as well.



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