This comet (official name: c/2004 Q2) was the tenth discovered by Don Machholz. He found it in the morning of Friday 27 August 2004 using an old six inch diameter telescope he bought for Christmas in 1968. The comet was to the southwest of Orion when I went out for the evening to watch and try to photograph the Geminid meteor shower.
This was taken on my first time out to do this type of astrophotography with my Canon EOS 20D camera. Since the location of the meteors can't be predicted, I spent time photographing various parts of the night sky and if a meteor showed up, that would be great.
I took this photograph with my Canon EOS 20D digital camera on a Losmandy G-11 equatorial telescope mount near Florence Junction, Arizona at 9:53pm the evening of 13 December 2004. The version you see here was made by stacking four images to reduce the random camera noise. The exposure of each image was 30 seconds at f/2.8 with the camera set for ISO 800 in RAW mode. The lens was a Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM at the 200mm position with the image stabilization turned off. Adobe Photoshop CS was used to perform the RAW conversion and image processing. Photograph by Rick Scott.
Updated: 24 December 2004