Comet Q2 Lovejoy, M42, Jupiter

This gallery contains images taken on January 10th, 2015 of Comet C2014 Q2 Lovejoy, The Orion Nebula (M42), Jupiter (and moons) as well as, probably, a satellite passing in front of the FOV of the Orion Nebula, called out by arrows. Based on research, the most likely candidate for one of the trails is satellite AJISAI (EGS), this does not include all of the trails.

The first image in higher resolution of Comet Lovejoy was taken from the BRT array a few hours prior to the images I took locally. If you look closely at the comet pictures, frame to frame, you can see it move across the background of stars.

Important things to note are the equipment used was a Meade LX-80 mount with a Meade AR-6 refractor connected to a Nikon D80 camera. Most shots were taken with ISO 800 and 20-30 second exposures. White balance was changed between automatic and daylight settings. For ease of posting they were taken in Large JPEG format vs. RAW.

The scope is heavy enough that the shutter release can cause the scope to move slightly, this is the primary cause of the star lines in the pictures posted. I trashed the ones that were extremely bad (with the exception of the M42 pictures showing an object going through).

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