On Friday, February 10, 2023 the bright green comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) passed very close to Mars. It was actually a bit of an illusion since the comet is much closer to us than Mars; 63 million kilometers compared to 145 million kilometers to Mars. Still it made for a dramatic sight.
We got very lucky at the observatory. We had just enough high, thin clouds to create a soft, colorful glow around Mars. I captured nearly 200 individual frames at 30 seconds each but the image above is made up of just 23 of them, chosen for the size and nature of the glow around Mars to create the perfect counterpoint to the comet’s green glow.
Use the slider in the main image to reveal all of the distant objects in the image. IC2087 is a galaxy as are all of the objects with a “PGC” label. PGC stands for Principal Galaxies Catalog published in 1989 and lists details for 73,197 galaxies.