Comet Lulin Images, Near Regulus In Leo

Welcome back!

At last, the skies over Kent cleared last night for a few hours.  I was finally able to photograph Comet Lulin.

This is something of a relief…  

For the past three weeks, I’ve been making maps of Lulin’s projected position for literally thousands of visitors.

Lulin close to Regulus, plus "streak", Feb 27th

What if I hadn’t seen it myself?

Anyway, I have now.  :)

The image on the right shows Lulin close to the star Regulus, in the constellation of Leo.

Between them is an orange  ”streak”.  I’m not sure exactly what it was, probably an aircraft.  But it’s interesting.

(PS. It has since been pointed out… if you look carefully, you can see the periodically flashing white and double-red lights, of a high-flying aircraft)

The image was captured with my Canon 1000D dslr camera, through the ED80 600 mm focal length refractor.  

It’s a single frame of 2 minute exposure at ISO 800.

I actually took about 15 frames with different exposure times.  I shall try my hand at stacking some of the best, to see if I can produce better images after processing.

Here’s the best single frame shot of Lulin I have found, so far.  It was a 3 minute exposure.  You can see from the star shapes, there is some tracking error.  I need to work on a better North alignment of the mount.

Comet Lulin, February 27th (click for larger)

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New Comet (Lulin) To Observe This Month

A new comet enters our skies in February.

Comet Lulin (2007 N3) is speeding towards the Earth, at present.  It will get closest to us on February 24th and be  less than half the Earth-Sun distance away.  Then it heads away again, out into our Solar System and by early April, Lulin will have already crossed the orbit of Mars.

Comet Lulin, before dawn 6th February, in Libra

The comet is called Lulin, after the observatory in Taiwan where the image of its approach was captured.  It was actually discovered in 2007, by a Chinese meteorology student Quanzhi Ye.

The good news for amateur astronomers is, Comet Lulin should be easily observable with binoculars or a small telescope.  

Here are some sky maps I’ve made using Stellarium software, for three particular dates in February (click each image, for a larger version). read on..