NOT the Moon

I've just spent a pleasant afternoon processing images taken last night of the comet C/2019 Y4 ATLAS. This was fun and educational. The sky was definitely not perfect for photographing the comet, since the comet was behind quite a lot of high cloudiness. My original thought was to get an LRGB (color) image, then see if I could get a time lapse showing it's movement across the sky. Well, it almost worked out that way. As I was imaging the different colors, the movement of the comet was faster than I thought it would be. From start to finish of the LRGB run, there was enough movement that the comet head could not align in the three colors. The result was a mostly color correct image, with the red channel showing thru separately at one point, just behind the head. It's clearly visible.

Comet C/2019 Y4. Yes, it really is green. (It isn't easy being green.... or so I hear.)

The second task was achieved by taking all of the channels separately and processing them into the “movie”, which is actually an MP4 file. If it's uploadable, I'll put it up here. If not, well, sorry. It's really pretty cool. It moved about 150,000 miles closer to the sun during the almost 1.5 hours of the imaging session.