Comet Pan-STARRS (C/2011 L4) in detail

This evening the sky was finally completely clear, so I managed to take a few nice shots of the comet again. I made the zoom-in below by averaging 9 individual 1 second exposures (as I have no motorised equatorial mount to track the comet, I can not use longer exposure times with the focus set to 200 mm, because the sky turns too fast). It was barely visible with the naked eye.

20130314_cometzoomin

The star positioned towards the top right from the comet is 51 Piscium, and the apparent distance of the two objects was 21.5′, or 2/3 of the apparent diameter of the Moon. And below is a more wide-angle look (aka, the full image at 200 mm a bit earlier during twilight).

20130314_comet

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