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3I/Atlas on a Seestar S50
by brian @ 13:00:52 - [perma-link]The faint diagonal streak near the middle of the image is the 3I/Atlas comet. My Seestar S50 live-stacked 6-7 (heh) hours of 10s subs, starting in the late evening on Jan 12.
It was partly cloudy when I started. I was only expecting to get the scope out and polar align on the new MSM wedge (which is pretty nice!). Around 10pm or so, the sky opened up.
On a whim, I tried looking for the comet. I set up the Seestar to track a star that was near it, according to SkySafari, and started capturing with the Astro filter. After a few minutes, a fuzzy blob became visible, slowly stretching out between two stars!
I let the capture run all night. Eventually the comet went behind some trees and the captures stopped succeeding. It ended up being over 2000 images. I deleted a few from the beginning and end that had branches poking into the corners. There was not enough space left on the Seestar drive to run the stack again, so I'll have to stack it on my computer.
Once I saw the streak growing, I aimed my Dwarf3 and Dwarf mini at it, too. While I was finding the right spot in the app, I saw a "3I/Atlas" label pop up, so I clicked on it. The Dwarves started tracking the comet!
Unfortunately, the Dwarf mini capture was cut short when a house suddenly jumped into frame. The Dwarf3 didn't have darks for higher gain, so I shot it with lower gain, and got a very faint image.
If I get another clear night soon, I'll try this again!
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