Longtime Astronomy contributor Terry Hancock sent in a video he and fellow amateur astronomer Cliff Spohn created. Here’s Terry’s report.
“We captured Comet ISON on Monday, October 21, 2013, from Cliff’s remote amateur observatory in Marion, Ohio. It was the first time in almost two weeks that we had a break in the clouds and rain, and we could not miss this rare opportunity to image the comet using Cliff’s QHYCCD QHY9 monochrome CCD camera hooked up to his 5-inch Telescope Engineering Company TEC-140 refractor (at f/7). Credit goes to Cliff for capturing the object, while I did the calibration, stacking in CCDStack, post-processing in Adobe CS5, and video editing. The total exposure time was 93 minutes — thirty-one 3-minute exposures, stacked.”
Let me just add a note: The two brightest stars near the center of the video shine at magnitudes 10.5 (lower left) and 11.2.
Nice job, guys! It’s fun to see the comet actually moving.