Farewell

On October 24th, during one of my Los Angeles layovers, I grabbed the opportunity and headed a mountain ridge in Los Padres National Forest to capture Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS with the Milky Way.

 

I started shooting about 10 minutes before the beginning of dark night. This gave me a slight orange glow on the horizon and helped to mitigate the light pollution from Vandenberg Space Force Base in the West. Furthermore, the low western horizon at my elevated shooting position allowed me to capture the Milky Way core reasonably high in the sky, despite the late season.

 

When it was fully dark, I was able to see Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS with my naked eye. While approaching the inner Solar System, the orbital period of Tsuchinshan-ATLAS was calculated to be about than 80,000 years. However, recent gravitational interactions altered this orbit, and the most current calculations show that it is on a hyperbolic path, meaning that it will never return.

 

A good time to bid the cosmic wanderer farewell.

 

EXIF

Canon EOS-R, astro-modified by EOS 4Astro

Sigma 28mm f/1.4 ART

IDAS NBZ filter

iOptron SkyTracker Pro

 

Sky:

5 panel panorama, each a stack of 6x 45s @ ISO800, f/2, unfiltered & 3x 105s @ ISO3200, f/2, filtered

 

Foreground:

Forcus stack of 7x 1/15s @ ISO100, f/2.8 during early blue hour

Done