Object: Comet 161P/Hartley-IRAS
Plate-solved focal length: 490.22 mm
Field of view: 2°35′47″ × 1°43′51″
Field center (J2000): RA 00h 43m 39.794s, Dec +01°40′28.08″
Processing software: Siril 1.4.4
What accomplished
This was a successful attempt to image and positively identify a relatively faint periodic comet.
Initially calibrated and registered the exposures in Siril, then examined individual frames to locate the comet.
The decisive observation was its movement relative to the background stars.
By blinking frames 3 and 58, separated by roughly an hour, could identify the moving object and compare its position with the predicted ephemeris for 161P/Hartley-IRAS.
The agreement provided a positive identification.
Subsequently produced a comet-centered stack, aligning the exposures on the comet rather than the stars, and cropped the resulting image.
Comet-centered stacked. Stars are streaks due to comet motion.
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