Click here to see an animation of the comet's motion.
I wanted to do an experiment and try to photograph Comet Machholz (c/2004 Q2) through Mira, my home made Lurie-Houghton telescope, from my home within the Phoenix metropolitan area. The comet was in Perseus and almost straight overhead.
This was also my first time to try guided astrophotography through my telescope. I used a Lumicon 2" Newtonian Easy-Guider with a graticle eyepiece to visually guide the telescope. I did this to keep the stars from drifting around due to imperfections and slight polar misalignment of the equatorial mount.
I took this photograph with my Canon EOS 20D digital camera. The telescope was attached to a Losmandy G-11 equatorial mount in the JaZ Observatory at my home in central Arizona from 10:16pm to 10:54pm MST the evening of 15 January 2005. This photograph was made by stacking six images to reduce the random camera noise. The exposure of each image was 90 seconds at f/4.63 with the camera set for ISO 100 in RAW mode. The lens was my Lurie-Houghton 9.8" f/4.63 telescope, which has a focal length of 1154mm. The field of view in this photograph is about 1.5 degrees wide by 0.75 degrees high. Adobe Photoshop CS was used to perform the RAW conversion and image processing. Photograph by Rick Scott.
Updated: 15 May 2005