In March 2022, astronomers discovered Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) aka the ‘Green Comet’ and it is on its closest approach to Earth in about 50,000 years. According to Forbes, the comet made its closest pass to Earth on February 1 and was visible to enthusiasts in a clear dark sky with binoculars. Since this happened for the first time in 50,000 years, several astrophotographers lined up to take shots of the marvel. One of them was a guy from Pune named Aditya Kinjawadekar.
Aditya travelled 8 hours from Pune to a remote village in coastal Maharashtra named ‘Bhoo’ and since the place is away from the city life, it is extremely dark – the perfect setup to capture the heavens. Here’s the picture that he took:
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“I used a simple DSLR camera to capture this image, paired with a 135mm lens on a star tracking mount. The star tracking mount is a very basic one, just giving me the tracking required to track the stars. This image consists of 27 minutes of data, made up of 9 exposures, each of 180 seconds long,” he revealed on Reddit’s r/India subreddit.
He stacked multiple images to reduce the noise and enhance the minute details. Against the stars, you can see that the green comet has a long tail.
The picture managed to blow the minds of several people online who lauded his skills as well as the effort that went into clicking this picture. Here’s what some of them said:
What a wonderful capture! 😀