Comet 46P/Wirtanen close approach to Earth
Taken by Mike Olason on December 16, 2018 @
Denver, Colorado
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Details:
These Gifs were created from images taken from 8PM December 15 to 3AM December 16 MST during the close approach to Earth of Comet 46P/Wirtanen as seen from Denver. The RGB images are one hour apart, each RGB image is 3 minutes long, limited by the fast movement of the comet and the equipment used so that the comet did not appear as a streak in any of the RGB images collected. The stars appear as red, green, blue dot streaks in each image due to the fast movement of the comet and stacking each red, green and blue image on the comet. 46P came within 7.2 million miles of Earth and during the 7 hours of time these Gifs cover the comet moved 1.24 degrees across Denvers night sky. Thin clouds started moving across the sky during the last 2 hours of these Gifs and resulted in the comet dimming in the last 2 images of the Gifs. As one can see in the Gifs when the German Equatorial Mount had to reposition from the east side of 180 degrees (south) to the west side of 180 degrees there was a hop in the stars centered around the comet, in other words the mount was not very well polar aligned.
You might wonder why are there 2 Gifs of the same thing, well, this is a test. I used 2 different software Gif makers, one appears to show the comet nucleus very well (I think) and the other appears to diffuse the nucleus but shows the coma better (I think). So the only way that I can really decide which I think is better is to put them online and see which one makes a better Gif and why. Any thoughts on which one looks better? Remember that the equipment that I used only had 18 arc second resolution per pixel and the images are 2.67 by 2.3 degrees, so things aren't going to look sharp anyway. As usual, to get the best resolution of these Gifs, select the large Gif image.
Thanks for any opinions you may have on the different Gifs. Cheers, Mike.
Photographer's website:
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