Here's a 34 frame stack. Stacking loses the turbulence in the exhaust but improves the grain. You can even just start to make out the front flaps in the silhouette.

In hindsight I should have debayered it myself after doing artificial dark subtraction, but I started with the de-bayered product. Rookie mistake.

It is

Really nice work. I also covered the Phobos thing in my live stream but I only went off the raw images for the navcam. I'll be linking to your side by side here if anyone doubts it's Phobos.

That isn't 3I.
youtube.com/live/QKls2xP...

You weren't kidding about the hot pixels. I did my best to calibrate and stack based on the orbit and astrometry of the images, there is some degree of cometary motion over 10 minutes and the result now has the nucleus as a still fuzzy but better defined single motion blurred line.

KAI-2020CM I believe? Ironically it's the same CCD in my SBIG deep space camera, but of course it's not optimized for that on Mastcam.

That makes sense. I'm used to much higher focal lengths and longer integration times.

Interesting ok, I might run them through astrometry then, I have a script to take the astrometrically solved frames and align them by polling JPL HORIZONS for the coordinates of the comet from the observer position at the imaging time.

Did you align the stack based on 3I's orbit or just the raw images without alignment?

I sadly no longer have mine, but to be fair I don't really have room for it. I remember the day I bought it there was someone trying to haggle the store owner on the price of an LX200 by saying he didn't need the eyepiece that came with it. The owner wasn't amused lol.

I had the 6", but I really only did lunar photography with it. I only had the basic clock drive too.

I agree! I missed out on it, I only had a Newtonian on a clock drive EQ mount in the late 90s, but I would see guys manually guiding at star parties and I always wanted to try it. I love the zen-like state of it and being a more active participant in taking the photo.

I have rolls of Kodak Ektar 100 to try this winter. Much less sensitive so it will require longer exposures, but it also has much finer grain. Although I could theoretically autoguide, I do enjoy the challenge of manually guiding. No electronics except the illuminated reticle!

The film used was CineStill T800, which I'm told is the same emulsion as the Amber 800T I used previously and that does seem to be the case. It has great response to hydrogen alpha light, but it is grainy. Here's a 30 min shot of the Bubble nebula from the same roll.
#astrophotography #filmisnotdead