As Photo Editor of Astronomy, I see some great stuff. I just received an e-mail from astroimager Tom Carrico. He shared with us an animation he did of Comet C/2007 N3 (Lulin). You’ll find Carrico’s creation in our videos section, “Watch Comet Lulin fly.”
Tom operates ARGO Observatory, which is located in central Oregon about 25 miles east of Bend. He imaged Comet Lulin from his observatory at New Mexico Skies February 21 through a 4-inch Takahashi FSQ-106 apochromatic refractor with an SBIG STL-11000 CCD camera. He took 61 one-minute images over a 2-hour period and combined them into an animated .gif file.
Along with the comet, you’ll also notice many streaks throughout the animation. Those are geosynchronous satellites whose movement Tom’s 1-minute exposures captured.
Although he downsized the original images to one-quarter their original sizes, the animation still weighed in at 29 megabytes!
More Comet Lulin coverage: