Periodic comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak is currently a magnitude 8 object for telescopes and unlike many other current bright comets like C/2015 ER61 (PANSTARRS) and C/2017 E4 (Lovejoy) it is visible for a good portion of the night while the other two are only visible in the morning twilight for those like me in the northern hemisphere.

On April 13th comet 41P was in the constellation Drago, which is where I managed to photograph it.

Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak (13-Apr-2017) – Benoit Guertin

Not much of a tail on this comet, and I’ve checked other photos taken with larger scopes and the result is also just a coma around the nucleus.

Because it is passing near Earth, its movement in the sky is quite noticeable frame-to-frame in the captured images. For the registration and stacking with comets, this is done by alignment on the comet and not the stars, hence the star trails in the above image. I performed another stacking, this time using the stars to align, and the comet’s movement becomes obvious. The displacement measures 2.6 arc-minutes in the 41 minutes that elapsed between first to last exposure.

UPDATE: Created a short video showing the comet’s movement

Distance traveled by the comet in 41 minutes

My setup was less than ideal, as the constellation was only visible from the front of my house.  Yes that is a lovely street-light shining right across the street.  Luckily the telescope was pointing a little to the right, and a rolled piece of cardboard help act as an dew-shield extension to block the glare.  But on the good side I had a nice solid concrete surface and got a very good polar alignment with 1 minutes exposures giving me nice round stars.  Hmmm, might explore this setup a little more often…

Setup in the garage to image comet in constellation Drago

Telescope: SW80ED
Camera: Canon XTi (450D)
Exposure: 32 x 60sec ISO 800
DeepSkyStacker, IRIS, GIMP

Other comets of interest for 2017