It has been an exciting week in the astronomy world with the near miss asteroid this morning following on from the amazing fireball meteorite over Russia which created shockwaves sufficient to break window glass an injure hundres of people.

In my last blog post I explained in detail the forthcoming occultation of Jupiter in southern Australia (mainly Perth and NE Victoria due to the expected cloud conditions elsewhere).

And tonight, I had the pleasure of photographing one of the 2 reasonably bright comets that are in the sky at present – the one I imaged was comet Lemmon which is passing the beautiful globular cluster 47 Tucanae and our neighbouring galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud.

This image was taken on 16th Feb 2013 with the Olympus E-M5 Micro Four Thirds camera mounted on a equatorial mount unguided for 60secs using a Canon EF 135mm f/2.0L lens at f/2.0 and ISO 3200. The long dimension of the image represents ~7 degrees field of view.

No cropping, just minimal tonal adjustments and some purple defringing:

 

I initially imaged it with the awesome Olympus 75mm f/1.8 lens at f/1.8 which gave excellent images apart from a touch of aberrations on the far edge. However, the field of view was twice as large as I needed for this shot, so I had to resort to the Canon 135mm lens to get the field of view exactly right.