Dutch astrophotographer films timelapse of colossal comet set to light up earth's sky
  • 4 years ago
A Dutch astrophotographer living in Groningen managed to film a timelapse of a comet that is around five times the size of Jupiter.

Comet Atlas has been dubbed by astronomy experts as the comet of the generation and is expected to light the earth's sky due to the shear brightness of it.

Matthijs Burgmeijer, an astrophotographer, told Newsflare: "I used my DSLR camera attached to my 10-inch Newtonian reflector telescope to gather the frames needed for this clip.

"To keep the comet centred in the frame over a long period of time I have to compensate for earth's rotation. For that, I use a motorized equatorial mount.

"I shot 160 frames each with an exposure time of 80 seconds at iso. I then converted all these frames to a single clip with a frame rate of 20fps. effectively bringing almost three hours back to 8 seconds."

This timelapse was filmed on March 29.
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