Tuesday, 20 June 2017

Comet Johnson C/2015 V2

COMET JOHNSON C/2015 V2.

This comet was also imaged on the night of 17 June 2017 along with comet 71P/Clark.
It is a hyperbolic comet discovered by Jess Johnson on the 3rd November 2015.
Here is a Stellerium screen shot showing it's location for today 20 June 2017.






When I went to process the image I had noticed something fuzzy close to the comet. This as it turns out was a wonderful surprise. I will expand more on that later.

Set up as follows:

Skywatcher 102 ALT/AZ Synscan goto.
Canon 1200D(No mods).
ISO 800.
30 X 25 second light frames.
30 X 25 second dark frames.
Stacked in DSS and processed in Star tools.

This comet is moving into better and better sky for me to observe and image and I hope to revisit this at it's best in my night skies here in the southern hemisphere.
So here is C/2015 V2 (Johnson).

Lot's off dust motes in there that necessitated a cleaning of the sensor after the shoot!

Now for the surprise.
I cropped the image and stretched it some more and to my surprise two objects showed themselves.
After running the image through astrometry.net to find out what I had, I see there are in fact three objects in the image besides the comet!

What I had also caught in the background is NGC 5566, NGC 5569 and NGC 5560.
Although NGC 5569 is barely visible in the image.So those three are a nice added bonus.
NGC 5566 is approximately 65 million light years from us!

Here is a cropped version showing the trio.

And the annotated image.




So that was the fun on my acre of Africa, clear skies friends!






2 comments:

  1. Way to go, good buddy. You sure have moved up in your skill sets. I'm proud to know you!

    Clear skies Mate!

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  2. All skills taught to me by seasoned pro's like yourself Bob. Your advice and help has always been very valuable.

    ReplyDelete