dan swiger
Well-Known Member
This was taken from the Coyote valley, south of San Jose. Got up up to Metcalf park by 3:30.
I should have done a recon in daylight to locate best viewing spot.
As it turned out, it wasn't near to being overhead of Lick Observatory from my location.
I kept scanning the skies with binoculars but nothing. Then about 4:20, it appeared, much behind the observatory.
I used my 7DMkII as it has better noise control & had chosen to use my 400mm old film lens/converted. The 1.4x teleconvertor provides the conversion, so I was at 560mm. Factor in the crop & I was at ~900mm equivalent. The comet almost filled the frame at that focal length.
Twenty-20 hindsight, I should have also tried by digital 200mm+TC+crop for about 450mm. I had that with me.
This would have given me better focusing and image quality. I'm tempted to go out again but wife will probably kill me!
The resultant image improvements would probably survive a simple crop.
I started out at ISO 12800 & 16000 at 2sec @f4.5.
As the sky began to lighten up, switched to ISO 6400 & got down to 1sec.
The stars were not pin sharp so I suspect the old optics had something to do with that. The noise is manageable.
I should have done a recon in daylight to locate best viewing spot.
As it turned out, it wasn't near to being overhead of Lick Observatory from my location.
I kept scanning the skies with binoculars but nothing. Then about 4:20, it appeared, much behind the observatory.
I used my 7DMkII as it has better noise control & had chosen to use my 400mm old film lens/converted. The 1.4x teleconvertor provides the conversion, so I was at 560mm. Factor in the crop & I was at ~900mm equivalent. The comet almost filled the frame at that focal length.
Twenty-20 hindsight, I should have also tried by digital 200mm+TC+crop for about 450mm. I had that with me.
This would have given me better focusing and image quality. I'm tempted to go out again but wife will probably kill me!
The resultant image improvements would probably survive a simple crop.
I started out at ISO 12800 & 16000 at 2sec @f4.5.
As the sky began to lighten up, switched to ISO 6400 & got down to 1sec.
The stars were not pin sharp so I suspect the old optics had something to do with that. The noise is manageable.
