Last night I was able to get an updated image of the comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), now known as the Green Comet or Circumpolar Comet (because it rotates around the north pole through the day and never sets below the horizon). It is approaching the Earth and will be closest to us around Feb. 1st before it returns to the distant depths of the Solar System. It's showing some very interesting structures, even from a fairly bright suburban sky.

The second image labels the main structures: nucleus (an icy/rocky body too small to see anything other than a point), coma (the fuzzy stuff around the nucleus), both a dust and ion (gas) tail, and even an antitail in the opposite direction to the other tails. The comet was also passing in front of a very distant galaxy known as NGC 5894, 130 million light-years away.

This is a composite of 113 frames, 60 sec. each (almost 2 hours total) from suburban Bloomington, Ind. It was processed twice: registered on the comet and separately on the stars and combined in Photoshop. (The comet moves across the sky fast enough that there is noticeable motion in a few minutes. Either the comet or the stars would be trailed in a standard composite).

Explore Scientific ED102 0.1m f/7 refractor, Stellarvue 0.7x reducer/flattener (560mm focal length), ZWO ASI294MC Pro color camera, Losmandy GM811G mount, ASIAir Pro controller, auto-guided. Processed in AstroPixelProcessor, Lightroom, and Photoshop.

#astrophotography #comet2022e3

The comet is a striking sight, just inside the naked eye magnitude now, through a telescope the head and tail are now visible and with photography even with a small backyard telescope it pops. The comet is changing every day, the anti-tail is now smaller as the comet passes through the plane of the Earth's orbit. The comet is projected to get even brighter in the next days ahead.

Captured with a Vixen VSD 100 mm F3.8 astrograph lens, 50 x 20 sec with a Nikon Z7II @ iso 1600 in Tucson AZ foothills.