Astroimager Damian Peach from Hampshire, England, captured Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) on September 24, 2013, with a 17-inch corrected Dall-Kirkham reflector and an FLI PL-6303e CCD camera. He combined five 3-minute luminance images with 2-minute images through red, green, and blue filters.
Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) continues to brighten, and images of it are starting to roll in. Here’s what this longtime astrophotographer added to his submission: “The comet is very low in our eastern sky, so low in fact that the wall of the observatory has prevented me from getting a clear shot for over a month. Yesterday morning, I was able to obtain this deep image with the reflector. Everything went right: perfect focus, smooth tracking on the nucleus, and a great composition with a bright star.” (12.5-inch Newtonian reflector at f/5, SBIG ST-10XME CCD camera, five 5-minute exposures stacked, taken September 16, 2013)
Frequent online contributor Efrain Morales Rivera shot Comet ISON on April 27 as it traversed the constellation Gemini. He used a Meade LX200 12-inch ACF telescope with an SBIG ST-402ME CCD camera. He captured an LRGB image with exposures of 3, 2, 2, and 2 minutes, respectively.
Comet ISON has passed inside the orbit of Jupiter on its way to a spectacular appearance in our sky beginning this fall. On March 2, it glowed weakly at magnitude 15.3 in the constellation Gemini the Twins. Astroimager Pat Knoll created this image by combining shots at the beginning and end of a session through the 22-inch William Kuhn Telescope at the Orange County Astronomers Observatory near the town of Anza, California. The times when he captured the exposures are on the image.
Dean Salman/NOAO/AURA/NSF
Arizona astroimager Dean Salman imaged Comet ISON and several galaxies through a 20-inch telescope from Kitt Peak National Observatory. The faint galaxy below ISON is IC 2196, which glows feebly at 14th magnitude.