ABSTRACT
C/2014 Q2 is a long-period comet that was discovered in August 2014 by Terry Lovejoy. It continued to brighten to magnitude 4 in January 2015, making it one of the brightest comets since Hale-Bopp in 1997. The final image is a composite of the star background and a comet image. The new PixInsight Comet Alignment module accomplishes both the registration and, after integrating the comet image, the isolation of the stars by subtracting the comet-only image. All the registered images were loaded into the Comet Alignment module and re-registered to the comet head. These images were integrated to form luminance and RGB linear files. The star processing was more conventional, similar to any RGB star image. The trick was to not over-stretch the image and maintain star color. The RGB image was softened slightly and the luminance data was sharpened using Masked Stretch.
