C/2022 E3 (ZTF) 2023-Feb-07 Chris Schur

Comet ZTF-E3 - First shot of comet with new camera!
in the evening sky
2/7/23

Here is a test shot taken last night of the comet, now 5th magnitude in Auriga and fading fast. The two dust tail features - The primary dust fan and secondary anti tail have now remerged into one brighter curving fan. The gas tail can be faintly seen, it has been fading rapidly since perihelion. The comet is not too impressive visually, a round fuzzy ball with a small extension on one side. It is more of an imagers comet!

With only a half an hour of darkness before the moon came up last night, I did some more testing of the new Atik 16200 camera. I don't have any filters or filter wheel yet, so it was a "Luminance" shot, only in black and white. Still the camera performed flawlessly, taking about 16 seconds per frame to download each 16 Megapixel frame. Also tested was the cameras larger APS-H chip (35mm diagonal) with the Nexus 0.75x coma corrector. This coma corrector was designed to be used with the much smaller APS-C chips and it was a pleasant surprise how well it did with this larger chip. At f/2.9 the images do have a lot of vignetting, about 1 - 1.5 stops darker in the corners. The flats removed this just fine, but you can see the corners are a bit noisier.

Overall, the experiment was a success, and if I ever need a wider 2.5 degree field for larger comets in the future, this is the super fast setup to use!

Lens: 10" f/2.9 GSO Astrograph Newtonian w/Nexus corrector
Platform: Astrophysics AP1200
Camera: Atik 16200 CCD
Exposure: 30mins
Location: Payson, Arizona
Elevation: 5150 ft.
Sky: Seeing 6/10, Transparency 6/10
Outside Temperature: 32F
Processing Tools: Maxim DL, Photoshop CS2

http://www.schursastrophotography.com/newcomets/CometZTF-E3-020723.html