Comet 46P/Wirtanen ©2018 James D Peterson. Various news articles mentioned that this comet would be visible this month (Dec., 2018), so of course I had to go out and capture it. This image was made in my back yard (Sedona, Arizona) at 4:36 AM MST on Dec. 19. I captured eight 2.5 second exposures with my Nikon D850 camera at f2.8, ISO 12800 using a Tamron 70-200mm lens at 200mm. To minimize the background noise that's inevitable at such high sensitivities, I manually aligned the images (because the stars moved a bit between farmes) and averaged them together. In this process, the light from the stars and the comet in the 8 images adds together while the background noise pixels, being random, tend to get averaged out.

It's not the most spectacular comet I've ever captured (no tail), but it's still an interesting green celestial fuzzball. Enjoy!