Comet Lovejoy C/2014 Q2 on Jan. 23, 2015 This is Comet Lovejoy C/2014 Q2, with its beautiful tail, as it appeared in the evening on January 23, 2015, photographed from a location near Bishop, CA. The field of view is about 7.5 x 5 degrees.
I was visiting the area as a tourist, so I had no heavy-duty astronomy gear -- just my 70-200 mm lens and a regular photographic tripod. I couldn't take an exposure longer than about 2 seconds without getting significant star trailing, so I made 130 exposures of 2 seconds (at 200 mm focal length, f/2.8, ISO 6400 on my Canon 6D) and then stacked them using DeepSkyStacker 3.3.2.
The result from my first attempt at using the program was very disappointing, so I gave up for a while, but finally I came back to it and got much better results after changing the stacking mode to Auto Adaptive Weighted Average for my light frames, and to Median Kappa-Sigma clipping for several of the calibration frames, yielding this image as a result (after further tweaking in Photoshop).
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