Comet McNaught C2009/R1 with a Mintron and an 11" SCT at f/10

I used an Omega modified 1/2" chip colour Mintron fitted with a light pollution filter to image Comet McNaught. The comet was in the lightest part of the June 21-22 sky, just above and to the west of Capella. I captured 15 min of high quality DVD of the comet and of dark frames. The BMP images were extracted from the DVD with VOB Frame Extractor and the dark-frames were scaled with Dark Frame Scaler. The dark-frame corrected frames were stacked in Registax.

Comet McNaught

Considerable structure is visible in the tail and the movement of the comet against the background stars can be seen by the faint, streaked stars.

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Comet McNaught C2009/R1 with a Mintron

An 80mm f/5 refractor was mounted on a Merlin Altazimuth Autotracking mount with a 1/2" inch chip Mintron fitted with a light pollution filter and an IR/UV cut filter. Comet McNaught was recorded on DVD at high quality for 15min and dark frame data were also recorded.

Comet McNaught C2009/R1

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M57 with Mono and Colour Mintrons and an 11" SCT

I used a half inch chip Monochrome MTV-22S85HC-EX Mintron and a half inch chip OMEGA MTV-72S85H-EX-SW colour Mintron camera at the prime focus of an 11" f/10 SCT. The monochrome image was used as luminance and the colour image was used for chrominance and the two images were combined:

Monochrome Image:

Colour Image:

Combined Image:

The monochrome image captured fine whispy detail at the edges of the nebulae which is visible in the final combined colour image.

Image data and darkframe data were recorded at high quality to DVD. The BMP frames were then recovered from the DVD with no loss of quality using our VOB Frame Extractor software. The darkframes were scaled using our Dark Frame Scaler software. The aspect ratio of the final images was corrected to 4:3

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