Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) put on a lovely show for astrophotographers in Sept-Oct 2024.
It is a comet from the Oort cloud discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory in China on 9 January 2023 and independently found by ATLAS South Africa on 22 February 2023. It passed perihelion at a distance of 0.39 AU (58 million km; 36 million mi) on 27 September 2024, when it became visible to the naked eye in the dawn sky (although this required a dark site and was still difficult to see requiring averted vision to see it).
In October 2024, it became an evening object.
The weakly hyperbolic trajectory may or may not result in the comet being ejected from the Solar System.
In early Oct 2024, I tried to capture it while I was in Queensland, Australia for a week but every night was clouded out, and now it was getting dimmer with each night.
Back in Victoria, I tried again on the 21st Oct but this time I was again thwarted by localised high cloud.
Finally, on the 24th October, after walking 20 minutes through a dark forest to get to a vantage point, I managed to capture it – albeit only with a camera on a tripod – no sky tracking device on hand.
It was only just visible to naked eye by averted vision some 1.5hrs after sunset but was more readily visible in binoculars – once you knew where to search for it.
Here are two images, the first a cropped single shot taken with a 24mm f/1.4 lens and edited in OnOne PhotoRAW, the second is a close up using a 85mm f/1.4 lens with 10 images of various exposures stacked in Affinity Photo then processed in OnOne PhotoRAW with minimal cropping.
Sony A7RIV with Sony GM 24mm f/1.4 lens 10secs at f/1.4 ISO 3200 on a tripod
The bright star is Venus in the constellation Scorpio sitting below the centre of the Milky Way.
Sony A7RIV with Samyang 85mm f/1.4 lens at f/1.4, varying exposures stack of 10 – 2.5secs ISO 1600-12800, on a tripod
