Comet Lovejoy Q2 and the Seven Sisters, 19th of Jan 2015

On the 18th and 19th of January, Comet Lovejoy Q2, at its brightest at magnitude 3.5, passed very close to the picturesque Pleiades Cluster (M45), also known as the seven sisters, in the constellation of Taurus. Since the skies were clear from San Jose I though I head out and shoot the comet with my Kodak Z990 bridge camera operating at ISO 1600 f/2.8 on my Orion Paragon HD-F2 photo tripod. With its backlit CMOS chip, I usually get fairly decent shots at the lower end of the zoom range. Even when focused at infinity, the camera sometimes has problems focusing on dim stars. With that in mind I went with the lower end of the zoom range and took 8x16 second shots with the 10 second timer to eliminate camera shake. The images were then resized in photoshop, stacked in MaxIM DL and processed in PS. Here are the results...enjoy..

"Comet Lovejoy Q2 is the fuzzy green object to right side of M45, slightly lower than the seven sisters"