Comet Atlas Update April 9th. Is Comet Atlas Breaking Up?

Will Comet Atlas make it’s Grand Appearance to the naked eye this May or will it break up.

Recently Astronomers have said they saw signs of it diminishing and with my observations and with my short Imaging time with my astronomy gear I did notice that it was dimmer but still showing up and can see the tail. I will be Imaging Comet Atlas every chance I get and update it’s images here. The image below shows Comet Atlas with iminmal processing to show how it it looked on April 9th.

This photo was imaged with an 8″ Ritchey-Creighton Telescope (It is the same telescope design that the Hubble uses). Not to say my telescope can image like Hubble, but it shares the same design. Light enters and hits the rear Hyperbolic Mirror then bounces to the secondary Hyperbolic mirror then bounces back into the focuser which at the end of it has the special Astro CCD/CMOS camera.

My camera the “ZWO 1600mm-Pro”, images in black & white and uses Special filters to attain color through a Filter Wheel and then combined in post processing software to attain a full color image. A OSC camera (One Shot Color Camera/DSLR) uses a thing called “Bayer Matrix” array. A Bayer matrix is placed over the cameras Sensor and consists of 4 colors RED GREEN and BLUE. Now you may ask why is it 4 colors and not 3 colors? Well the 4 colors are usually consisted of 1 Red, 1 Blue and 2 Green pixels combined into one pixel to achieve full color. The main difference between imaging with a Mono camera vs a OSC is that each color is getting full signal strenght to it where as a color (OSC) gets 1/4th of the image. Each camera has its Possitives and Negatives and I will discuss it on another topic on AstroNebula.com in the near future.

The lines you see in the image are star trails caused by the different speed of the comet. They can be removed with further processing but I thought it would be best to show Comet Atlas in it’s near natural state.