Last week I was able to get some good images of Comet 144P/Kushida which was located in the constellation Taurus and near the star Aldebaran. Being this close to a bright star makes it fairly easy to find.

I first shot using an 80-200mm zoom lens. The short end (80mm) gave me a wide field of view to find the comet and then I zoomed to the long end (200mm). After about a half-hour of shooting I decided to switch to the 200-500mm zoom lens. Starting at 200mm to center the comet, I then zoomed to 500mm. The image above is the result of stacking 22 images (11 minutes exposure time) then post processing with rnc-color-stretch and finally, Lightroom and Photoshop. Above is a screen shot from the sky application Stellarium showing the field of view at 500mm.

Bonus: image of the waxing gibbous Moon a week later. The image was converted from RGB to L*a*b color space and then the two color channels were adjusted to bring out the subtle colors of the Moon.