Up early this morning to try and pick out the clutch of comets currently in the Northern Hemisphere morning sky. All these shots were taken with the 70-200/4L at 200mm, f/4, on the 7D, mounted on an Astrotrac.
First I shot Comet C/2013 R1 Lovejoy, which is nice and high in the dark sky. This is a comet-centred stack of 13 30-sec exposures at ISO1600. Although ISON is brightening quickly, at the moment Lovejoy is the best one. This is pretty-much the full frame, so the tail is quite long.
Then eventually ISON came up, but I was shooting from my garden, and Virgo comes up behind a large tree at the end of it. That limited to me just catching it while still very low, before it disappeared behind the tree. I'll have to find another spot to get a better one. This is the whole 200mm image, so same scale as the Lovejoy image..
Finally, I had a go also at Comet C/2012 X1 Linear, which, though faint, is nice and close to Arcturus, so easy to find. Because it was so faint, for this image I've cropped it to about half the frame size, just to help it show up.
