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Comet Lovejoy, January 18

Comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy last night, as seen under the dark skies of the Eastern Sierra. Knowing where to look (near Pleiades) I was able to just make it our with my eyes, and find it with a 70-200 mm lens.

 

It showed up well in photos captured on a full frame DSLR with 16 - 35 mm lens at 30 mm focal length with no star tracking mount, but for the 200 mm shots I used a tracking mount so the stars wouldn't "drag" in the photo from the rotation of the earth.

 

To keep the processing simple I captured 3 exposures and processed them in Adobe Lightroom and Photomatix HDR software.

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Uploaded on January 19, 2015
Taken on January 18, 2015