Astrophotos

Location: Mount Pinos, CA
Date: May 11, 2002
Subject: Comet Ikeya-Zhang
Exposure: Combination of 1 12-min. and 4 20-min. exposures adjusted in Adobe Photoshop
Telescope: Megrez 80mm @ f/5
Mount: Losmandy GM-8
Guiding: ST-4 autoguider
Film: Fuji Super HQ 100
Comments: The outbound comet Ikeya-Zhang on May 11, 2002. The comet shows a fairly strong ion tail but a very faint dust tail that seems to be going towards the left. The short dust tail may be due to the fact that the comet is moving "backwards," on its way out of the Solar System. The image on the left is a straight combination of all five images taken that night with the image registered on the comet's nucleus. The image to the right was created using the "darken" option to subtract stars on separate images then combined to reduce grain. The resulting image was then pasted into a mask to keep round star images and help increase the contrast of the comet's dust tail.