Comet 3I/ATLAS: Move along. Nothing to see here.
Despite all the sensational headlines you may read on the internet, Comet 3I/ATLAS remains an unremarkable object in the morning sky. My animated GIF above, taken on December 9th, shows a tiny little comet-like object moving past a background star over a period of about 7 minutes. The planetarium software that I use, Cartes du Ciel, indicated that 3I/ATLAS was around 15th magnitude. I think it looks a little brighter than that, but I have to admit that whatever its official magnitude is, 3I/ATLAS is getting a lot more attention and hype than it deserves! I didn't go to the trouble of converting pixel counts to stellar magnitudes, but the line graph feature in MaxIM DL CCD software shows that the brightness of 3I/ATLAS maxes out at around 9,100 counts. My camera has a 16-bit digitizer, so the display range for each pixel is from 0 to 65,535, with 0 being representing black and 65,535 representing white. In a 15-second exposure, the brightest pixels in 3I/ATLAS are only 14% of full p...