Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) and M44 (Tony Cook)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cancer (Cnc) · Contains: 41 Cnc) · Almalaf (ε Cnc · Beehive · M 44 · NGC 2632 · Praesepe Cluster · The star 38 Cnc · The star 39 Cnc · The star 40 Cnc · The star Meleph

Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) and M44, Tony Cook

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Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) and M44

Comet NEAT (C/2001 Q4) passing M44 on 15th May 2004

This was my first ever astrophotograph taken through a telescope. The mount was a newly acquired Losmandy GM8 on its first outing. The camera was a "steam driven" (i.e. now somewhat ancient) Canon 10D.

At the time I knew so little about astrophotography that I polar aligned by sighting up the saddle plate at Polaris, shot bracketed sequences from 10 seconds up to 2 minutes, had no idea about darks, flats or anything else for that matter! Oh! and I had to deal with a police patrol wanting to know what on earth I was doing setup on the roadside (I was up on a moor top road about 2 miles from an US run electronic eavesdropping site near Harrogate - but shush I didn't say that).

Most attempts had the comet outside the frame. However 6 frames were succesful and it just happened that the polar misalignment and the comet motion nearly cancelled. However the background stars were a streaked mess, so this image is a composite of a reshot frame of M44 recomposited with the original comets images extracted using a comet aligned stack and median combine to lose the duff streaked stars. This was done sometime in 2006 when I had acquired the skills to sort out and repair my somewhat flawed first attempt at AP.

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Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) and M44

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