Another look at Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS


In my previous post, I shared a picture of the comet that I took with a DSLR and 28 mm camera lens on a fixed tripod. As I was taking those pictures, I was looking forward to shooting the comet through the CPC-1100 and HyperStar combo. Tonight, I carried out that plan, but the results were not as good as I had hoped!

There seemed to be two problems with the comet. First, it's just very dim. Even with an f/2 optical system, the comet lacked "punch" in my pictures. Longer exposures washed out with sky glow. Shorter exposures were lackluster. I couldn't win. Second, there were no interesting features in the tail structure to be revealed in the better resolving power of the telescope. The tail looked as smooth as it did with the lower-powered camera lens. 

One feature that did show up, however, was the comet's anti-tail. You can look up "anti-tail" if you wish, but I'll save you the time and just tell you here that the anti-tail is not really a comet's tail. Rather, it's debris left behind in the path of the comet. We only see a comet's anti-tail when earth passes through the plane of the comet's orbit. This occurred coincidentally during the past couple of days that I was shooting the comet. An anti-tail may look like a spike or a fuzzy line in the opposite direction of the comet's tail.

In any case, my overall impression of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is that it's bittersweet. On the one hand, it's a large comet and we can see it with our unaided eyes. That makes it a pretty good comet! But on the other hand, it's quite dim and featureless compared to other comets in its class. There's no colorful ion tail or fancy streamers. 

This is NOT your "comet of the century" by any stretch, despite what the headlines say. But it's certainly one of the best of the 21st century so far.


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