Hi all

In a new idea for my site, once a week i’ll feature an old image and bring it back to life here and give some background and information on capturing and processing the image(s). I’ll mainly concentrate on images taken over the past few years, before my site was created so they won’t have been featured here before.

First cab off the rank is Comet McNaught (C/2006 P1). It’s a perfect subject to be featured this week because it’s exactly 2 years ago that it first made an appearance in our southern skies. It brightened rapidly to become one of the “great” comets, the best in 40 years and visible even during daylight. At its peak on the 20th January 2007, it had a tail that spread across over 40° of sky.

Comet McNaught, captured at IISAC2007 in the Hunter Valley of NSW

Continue reading to see more images of Comet McNaught and details about their capture and processing.

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Hi all

Although my body was aching from my first sparring class in over 4 weeks at Karate the night before, I was still determined to get up at 2am to image Saturn on the morning of the 14th January. The very hot days we’ve had and the High Pressure system sitting over the NSW East Coast is usually a good sign that the seeing is going to be quite good.

It didn’t disappoint, and I was able to capture Saturn from between 2:30am to 4:30am in quite reasonable seeing – definitely my best for this apparition.

Saturn - 14th January

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