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Photographer:

Mike Olason

Location of Photo:

Tucson, Arizona

Date/Time of photo:

2024 August 6, 0307UT

Equipment:

50mm f/3.5 Refractor and ST-402ME CCD camera

Description:

C/2023 A3 on the evening of 2024 August 6 was magnitude G=8.5 as calculated from 40x2 second images taken with no filter in an aperture diameter of 2.1'. Using single images Astrometrica could not find enough good star data to due calculations from images taken in hazy nautical (Sun at -10 degrees) twilight skies at an altitude of 2 degrees. So manually averaged 40 images each 2 seconds long into an 80 second stack, used Nebulosity to generate a synthetic flat field on that stack of images and then Astrometrica had good star data to generate a magnitude calculation on C/2023 A3 despite the hazy star field. Note that Astrometrica used the time of the first image in the stack (03:06:06 UT) since that is what the header information of the stacked image provided Astrometrica, but the positions