Astronomy, Astro Photography and Landscape Photography
Photographs of Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann
This page contains photographs of Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann.
Below is a Vimeo video containing 15 frames captured over the period of June – July 2013 showing the outburst of comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann. The image quality is somewhat degraded by video compression and trying to make each frame normalised to produce a smooth video rather than optimising each frame for its own conditions. Moon glow and other factors affected the image quality.
The remainder of this page contains photographs of Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann starting from June 2013.
On the 19th June I took the usual sequence of 5 x 180 second exposures. The first image shown here is processed with the exact same curves & levels as the image on the 15th June below these. You can see variation in the comet, that it is now less centrally bright and instead has a wider area immediately around the nucleus (sorry for my lack of scientific language!). The second image is the same stack from the 19th processed differently. All images are at the same 0.86 arc seconds per pixel scale and all are crops of the 100% images (not resized), providing you click the images below to view the full size file. The light distortions across the image are from the Moon which was 10 degrees away.