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.

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 170 million km (1.1AU) from Earth.

Capture details

Data captured 10 March, 2020.
41x 3 minute exposures with Luminance filter.
Images captured between 8pm & 11pm.

Total Exposure = 2.0 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.