Comets during full moon

After 2 weeks of thick cloud coverage, I had the chance to spend the evening at the observatory. Actually I jumped in to hold the guided tour this evening…
As there was almost full moon and some cloud coverage (which got steadily thinner) I played a bit around with the setup. I thought – deep sky at full moon is a waste of time. But how about the comets 46/P Wirtanen and 38/P Stephan-Oterma? How brigth are the comets still? Would they shine through the moon lit sky?
Well… I could not make out Stephen-Oterma. But Wirtanen was barely (in)visible. I had some other tasks to do, so I attached the camera to the scope and let it run to see, what may be gathered under these conditions.
Despite of the Moon and the corona of Moon, a little bit of the comets was still possible to process from 90 minutes of total exposure time each:

Total solar eclipse 2017 from Riverton, Wyoming

All the effort to travel around the world for just a few images…  Well, it was really a challenge to carry the 60+kg equippment to Riverton, Wyoming. It was even more challenging to try to last-minute fix an error in my computer controlled camera trigger system. And last but not least, 2 cameras stopped capturing during totality… It would have been a total disappointment, if…

… if my best camera / lens combination I had set up wouldn’t have done the following 🙂
See for yourself, why I am absolutely happy:

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