The Comet

 This month I went out on two separate occasions and captured some images of the recently passing comet. Which one? Well...here's what Wikipedia had to say about this comet.

C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) is a comet from the Oort cloud discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory in China on 9 January 2023 and independently found by ATLAS South Africa on 22 February 2023. The comet passed perihelion at a distance of 0.39 AU on 27 September 2024, when it became visible to the naked eye. Wikipedia

Orbital period: ≈ 110 million years (inbound); ≈ 235,000 years (outbound)

Discovered: January 9, 2023

Discovered by: Purple Mountain Observatory; ATLAS South Africa

Mean diameter: ~3.2 km

Aphelion: ≈ 270,000 AU (inbound); ≈ 3,800 AU (outbound)

Argument of periapsis: 308.5°

Comet nuclear magnitude (M2): 9.2 ± 0.3

Now, here are the images I captured over those two nights.

That streak in the upper right corner was an aircraft flying by while the camera shutter was open during the exposure. Which was for several seconds.

Overall, I'm pleased with the images. For the first batch, I used three-second or longer exposure times. I cranked up the ISO for the second batch and made no more than two-second exposure times. I wanted to reduce the trailing effect of the stars while the Earth rotated when the shutter was open.