Daytime Comet

With news outlets and astronomy forums alike full of another ultra bright "great comet" I of course wanted to observe C/2024 G3 (ATLAS). This was an idea I came up with just the day before, so I aligned the telescope in the evening and I glued an old Canon polarizer filter that I found around the house - hoping this would decrease the amount of atmospheric reflections.

Passing extremely close to the sun, however, meant there was virtually no window for observation in the northern hemisphere, especially from Switzerland, where the mountainous horizon regularly makes comet photography more challenging than it already is.

As such, and given its extreme brightness measured by SOHO, I took it as a new challenge to get my first daytime comet photo. And I don't just mean daytime as in twilight, I set up my telescope at noon and went looking for the comet.

The atmosphere didn't make my life easier, with horrendous seeing conditions, but I finally managed to focus the telescope on Venus, and from that point on it was relatively straightforward to find the comet. I made sure to synchronize my mount to the Sun using a solar filter just before slewing to the comet in order to avoid accidentally pointing my unprotected optics straight at the Sun. This was the day of perihelion and the comet was less than 5 degrees away north from our star.

I took many series of images, having to keep the exposure times extremely short to avoid saturaing the sensor on the extremely bright background.

Processing mainly consisted of restoring the white balance of the image.