I had a fun adventure on a Monday night into Tuesday morning, finally catching comet
C/2022 E3 (ZTF) at the Milwaukee Astronomical Society grounds in -5 degree F temps at 3am one early morning before it reached its closest point to Earth. The night started off with more clouds, after what has seemed to be months of them, so I did a little shoveling around the grounds to keep warm - temps started dropping to 5 degrees by around 9-10pm. It's amazing how anxious we get for a potential clear sky after so long! Finally 11pm came, and my stubbornness paid off - the high clouds started to lift even though the moon was still very bright and was washing the sky out a bit, generating a 17.75 SQM reading at the time. Temps were hovering around zero now however. What better time to set up cold metal equipment to get scope #2 going... The resulting picture below is my early effort of registering the comet, aligning and stacking the 30 second frames I was shooting with my Vixen AX103s refractor reduced to 578mm and the ZWO 2600mc with my ASIair system.
For the processing I decided to use Astro Pixel Processor, as the comet stacking and registration is efficient to run for share and processing. I also opted to keep the star blur in there, rather than the less authentic method of processing once with stars and again without. I may try a combined method of stars + comet, but life moves on meanwhile and this image felt a bit more realistic to discovering the comet in motion, registering the comet to get data after increasing the rejection levels to maximize star reduction.
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