Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Comet C/2013 US10 Catalina

Comet C/2013 US10 Catalina

Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 30 Jan 2016 at 11:06:21 (UTC)

Original – Comet C/2013 US10 Catalina in Virgo constellation just before dawn of 09 Dec 2015. One can clearly see its two tails. The first one (upper left corner) is a narrow gaseous tail directed against the sun by the solar wind. The second one (lower right corner) is a widespread dust tail aimed along the comet's orbit. Image shot from Karabi-Yaila (1000m above sea level), Crimea, Russia. Shot with Canon 600D DSLR mounted on Celestron 8" SCT with focal reducer (focal length 1280mm) on Celestron AVX mount with NexGuide autoguide on 80mm Guidescope. Stack of 5 single exposures 5 minutes processed in PixInsight+Photoshop.

Reason

very good quality picture with EV

Articles in which this image appears

C/2013 US10

FP category for this image

Wikipedia:Featured pictures/Space/Looking out

Creator

Alexander Vasenin

• Support as nominator Not as impressive as NASA images, but a very good work for an amateur astronomer. It also could be useful to illustrate other articles. – Yann (talk) 11:06, 20 January 2016 (UTC)
• comment there are a number of lines of red pixels (most obvious is at 4 o'clock to the nucleus. Anyone know the cause?©Geni (talk) 11:28, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

• File description says: stack of 5 exposures over 5 minutes. I think those are bad sensor pixels. The 5 images were aligned later in software because the stars move over 5 minutes. So the bad pixels streak like that. Bammesk (talk) 03:27, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
• (Author) Yes, those are hot pixels. I used dark frames (as well as bias and flat frames) to calibrate every light frame before stacking them. Unfortunately sometimes it's not enough. I'll fix those and post updated image. BTW, it's 5 frames with 5 minutes exposure for each frame (I've fixed the description). It's quite difficult multistep process to stack a comet image, because a comet moves very significantly relative to background stars over half an hour. --Alexander Vasenin (talk) 04:17, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Not Promoted --Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 11:41, 30 January 2016 (UTC)