I returned to the Maumelle River WMA with Carl to try for the comet again. The conditions were not as good as Wednesday night. Clouds, haze, heat, mosquitoes. The sky did do some clearing so I took some shots. I set up a tracking mount this time since I wanted to shoot at 300mm instead of 50mm. I hoped to take 30 second subs but my slapdash polar alignment didn’t allow for that. I settled on 10 seconds which was still too long but without tracking, I could only have done a second or so.
The haze cut down the contrast a lot and in fact toward the end you could barely make out the comet in binoculars. When I first looked at the images, I thought the night was a bust but decided to stack 10 images (with Deepsky Stacker) and see what that looked like. I was able to get something I could work with. I processed the result in Lightroom Classic. Each frame was 10 seconds, ISO 3200, 300mm FL, f/5.6.
I might be kidding myself but I think I can barely make out the ion trail above the bright dust trail to the right of the comet’s head. The dust trail curves downward slightly while the ion trail is straighter.
