C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS)

Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS), the last comet discovered in 2019, photographed by Pete Lawrence. Its orbit matches the Great Comet of 1844. Second session.

Target details

C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) was found by the ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) survey on 28 December 2019, making it the last comet discovered that year. It travels on a near-parabolic orbit – a long, stretched path in from the outer Solar System – and that orbit closely matches the Great Comet of 1844's, which has led to speculation that it may be a fragment of that earlier comet.

When these images were taken the comet was 158 million km (1.1AU) from Earth.
I have imaged this comet, with the same settings, two weeks earlier. It has brightened significantly since then. You can see the previous data here.

Capture details

Data captured 26 March, 2020.
33x 3 minute exposures with Luminance filter.
Images captured between 8pm & 11pm.

Total Exposure = 1.7 hours.

Equipment details

Skywatcher Quattro 200 CF
NEQ6 Pro
Atik 460 Mono
Skywatcher ST-80
QHY5L-II

Processing details

This image was processed in Pixinsight & PIP.
Calibration in Pixinsight using Batch PreProcessing.
STF & Histogram Transformation - To Apply an AutoSTF.
Dynamic Crop - To remove reduce FoV.

All images saved as JPEG and imported into PIPP.

Framerate set to 5fps.

Exported as full resolution AVI & GIF, image on this website is GIF. The AVI is much smoother but unfortunately my website doesn't currently support videos.